Click Nothing

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part IV

Savannah.

It's hot here - like 25 degrees and sweltering humid. Didn't expect that as I'd been keeping an eye on the temperature in the weeks before we left, but what can you do.

So far, things have been going very well. After GameX, I did three big schools pretty much back-to-back. First was CMU in Pittsburgh, then MIT in Boston and after that, NYU in Manhattan. Each time I had the pleasure of getting different tours, meeting and talking to lots of students and seeing what they were working on, and each night following the talk, I was lucky enough to get to grab dinner with some faculty or students or local devs or all of the above. So I've gotten to see a lot of cool stuff, and meet a lot of cool people, and eat a lot of great food (dessert at Rouge Tomate - check it out if you're in NY)

The talk seems to go over well, even though it's a pretty hardcore philosophical talk. Anyway, it was really intended for Masters students, so it's not a typical 'general public' audience, and - judging by the questions that I'm getting grilled with - it shows.

Tonight, we've got tickets to the Savannah Film Festival. Sounds like we'll getto see Woody Harrelson premiere his latest film (not the zombie one). After that, another fancy dinner at The Pink House - while we watch the kids wander around trick-or-treating in their ghost town of a village.

Tomorrow I give the talk here at SCAD in Savannah, and then Tuesday I'm off to Atlanta for the last stop.

Thanks to everyone who has showed up so far, and I look forward to meeting more of you in the next few days.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part III

So the 'lecture' part of the 'lecture tour' doesn't start until tomorrow but the 'tour' part started late last night with a phonecall from US Airways (all the way to Montreal from Raleigh, NC) saying that my 9:30am flight would be delayed until 11:10.

That all changed of course with a 6:30 am call saying the 9:30 flight that had been pushed to 11:10 was now jumping forward to 10:40.

Of course, once we got to the airport everything changed again and we didn;t even get off the ground until well after noon and any hope of a pleasant day in wandering Philadelphia was delayed even further by a nasty headwind that made a 90 minute flight last almost a full two hours and - with renting a car and all that shit didn't get us into town until like 3pm.

We wandered the touristy center of town, saw the Liberty Bell and then strolled through intermittent rains down to South Street. The highlight of the day was an awesome dinner at a place called Farmicia, which is an organic, local food restaurant that I actually got to be the founder of on Gowalla. Shame on you Philadephians for not founding it yourselves. Fantastic food, healthy, innovative with fresh, organic local and seasonal ingredients. A real winner. I'd come back to town just to eat there again.

Anyway - unfortunately, GameX is not even really in Philly - it's in some suburb like 30 minutes out of town... which kind of sucks (hopefully they'll remedy that for next year). So now I am back at the hotel doing a final, final (final) FINAL pass on my talk for tomorrow. Anyway, with the messed up sleep I haven;t been getting in the last three weeks - a good long nights rest before my keynote is just what the doctor ordered.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part II

In the beginning, there was nothing

It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009.

It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days.

The talk, as detailed in a previous post, is about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.

The dates and locations, for those who might be intertested in attending, are as follows (though not all are open to the public):

Sunday, October 25th, 9:30 am
GameX Convention, Keynote
(details)

Monday, October 26th, 3:30 pm
ETC Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:00 pm
MIT, GAMBIT Game Lab
(details)

Thursday, October 29th, 6:00 pm
NYU, New York
(details pending)

Monday, November 2nd
SCAD Savannah
(details pending)

Monday, November 3rd
SCAD and IGDA Atlanta
(details)

For a walkthrough of the tour, you can drop this into Google Earth. If you're on Dopplr, friend me and you'll see the specific dates I expect to be around in which towns. If you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, friend or follow me and you'll be able to keep tabs on my frequent updates.

Since I already gave an early version of the talk at Ubi, here in Montreal, the Twitter stream for the tour and its collected talks is live if you want to listen in on #CNTour09.

Hopefully, if you had any interest at all in listening to my demented ramblings, I will be coming to somewhere vaguely near where you live - drop by and see the talk and harrass me with questions that I won't be able to answer and then we have a drink and talk less seriously.

If I'm still not coming anywhere near you or if you have to go to your cousin's wedding on the night I am passing through your city - don't worry. I am currently in the process of building out video for many of my previous talks - including this one - and I hope that over the coming months you'll have access to this material in video format that you can watch in your underwear while eating ice cream, or on your iPhone on the bus - or both.

Hope to see you somewhere between here and 32 degrees North latitude.

(No, I don't have t-shirts, but I promise if I survive this and do it again next year, I will have some made.)

Nothing Changes

Like you didn't notice.

In preparation for more big stuff coming soon to Click Nothing, I am in the process of overhauling the blog. I don't have a lot of time to mess about, so I'll still be relying heavily on templates but I figured it was time for a change. Anyway - it should be fairly apparent (if only from the banner cleverly saved as a jpeg with ugly compression artifacts and all) that my webskilz perished along with dusty old Web 1.0. I'll get around to polishing out the ugly bits when I can.

For now, since I always wanted a blog that looked like my shoes - I made one.

Oh - and by the way - www.clicknothing.typepad.com can now be reached by the much simpler www.clicknothing.com as I finally got off my lazy ass and registered my domain. I'm still being hosted at typepad for now so none of your old links should be broken.

Anyway - thanks for all your continued support, and keep checking back over the coming couple months as I roll out all the cool new stuff.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part I

So for those who missed it in the microsecond that it flew past on Twitter, I will be keynoting the GameX Industry Summit conference taking place in Philadelphia on Oct 24-25. Here are the working title and summary of the talk I plan to give:

The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm

The games of today unsurprisingly strive to mimic the linear, authored structures of previous generations of media largely because gamers and game developers have grown up in a world where those media are culturally dominant. That is changing. As our media become more richly interactive and as our experience of the world becomes increasingly fragmented and parallelized, a new media culture is disintegrating the old. Games of the future will reflect this cultural shift by themselves becoming more fragmentary, more parallelized, and less focused on rich simulation and traditional notions of immersion.

This talk examines the potential long-term future of gaming by looking at the accelerating convergence between rising technologies and competing media from the internet, games, music and narrative media to augmented reality and the prominence of portable wireless devices.

Sorry that the summary sounds so brainy and cerebral - I promise it will be a talk about games and that it will be as chaotically poetic and filled with increasingly obsolete jokes about the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons as the rest of my recent talks.

But more than just announcing that I'm speaking at GIS, I wanted to announce that I am expanding the trip to do the talk in several other cities. I don't want to announce any places or dates yet, because I'm still putting it together, so I'll let those interested speculate away. I will admit that a part of planning this as a 'tour' was because I am a couple of trips 'in debt' following cancellations resulting from my injury - so if you had been hoping to see me talk a few months ago and were disappointed by a cancellation, odds are good you'll be getting a second chance.

For the subject of the talk - it spawns out of a lot of the thinking I have been doing recently. Needless to say once you come off a project and get some rest, your narrow, single-minded focus on closing and delivery opens up and you get to look at the big picture again... so that psychological shifting of gears definitely has inspired the core of the talk. Also, recent conversations online - particularly the discussion that evolved out of my debate with Manveer, and even yesterday's discussion on the nature and future of the expressive potential of games between David Jaffe and Anthony Burch (and others) (extended) are all topics that have been close to my heart lately and will be elementary to the talk. I'm hoping to be able to synthesize some of these ideas with my own recent talks about Immersion and Generational Shift. If you really want to get the most of the upcoming 'CN Tour 09' talk, you might want to refresh yourself on those two previous talks...but...

As an added bonus (and you get all this for free!) - I am also looking toward launching a few other special projects to 'celebrate' the tour that will hopefully increase the utility of Click Nothing as a whole and make the idea of reviewing those old talks a little easier.

So - to use the most ironic metaphor I can muster - stay tuned - if I can keep a modicum of focus, it's going to be an exciting post-midsummer.