I session-hopped; too many interesting sessions this morning.

Cliff Figallo talks about “Putting conversation to work.” He’s one of the founders of The Well and lived on The Farm, a well-known hippy commune, for years; Stewart Brand, the creator of The Well, wanted people with communal experience running it, not businesspeople.

“Attention is energy,” he says: the person being attended to gets energy from it, including people who are being jerks.

Conversations that work, he says, are different than ones where people connect for enjoyment. He’s thinking of conversations as something that organizations do to get their jobs done. “Power imbalances destabilize conversations.” In business conversations, there’s often an imbalance. Thus a “subtext” develops in which you can read the disenfranchisement. To keep a business conversation going, the business has to evolve into something more egalitarian. But within the conversation, first you have to acknowledge the power imbalance. Second, you should have a “full value contract”: everyone agrees that they’re going to listen to one another, respect one another, and do what they can to encourage one another speak.

Warren Spector (“Deus Ex”) and Richard Vogel (“Star Wars”) are talking about games. Spector says that the next step in facial expressions is on the way, coming first maybe from Valve (Half Life 2).

Someone in the audience recommends there.com where you get control over your character’s emotions, but apparently there’s nothing actually to do. Spector says that he thinks Star Wars on line will be the first massively multiplayer game in which “game designers haven’t completely abdicated their duty.”

Spector has had so little success finding writers who can write that now he’s hired programmers who can write. “Thief and Thief 2 are literature with regard to their writing,” he says. (Well, I’ve played Thief and it’s a good game but it isn’t literature. Now, No One Lives Forever is different issue.)

Spector sums up the latest Game Development Conference: Sequels, online stuff, and the process issues involved in game development, and how to come up with games that put players in charge (“Grand Theft Auto”).

Vogel: Agrees. GTA3’s gameplay is “awesome.”

I didn’t go to Po Bronson’s “How to live your life” session because I don’t want to live my life. I want to live Po Bronson’s life.

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