Click Nothing

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.

IGDA Montreal - Generations Talk

So last night I did my talk on 'The Next Generation of Gamer' at the IGDA Montreal chapter meeting. It was fun and I was glad to have a little more time to polish and practice it after having done the talk previously at Game Design Expo in Vancouver.

A lot of people asked me and emailed me regarding the slides - or even in some cases just the demographic  data I had pulled together and aggregated. Unfortunately, I'm not going to post the slides just yet. I will be giving the talk again at GDx in Savannah in mid-April so I don't want to post the slides until I have met my obligations to the conference there.

For those interested - expect to see the slides, the text of the presentation, as well as all the data I aggregated in pure form posted on or around the 25th of April. Also - a lot of people asked me specific questions about immersion - as coming to a better understanding of immersion was one of the challenges I pointed to in the talk. For those interested in immersion and my half-formed thoughts on it - I'll point you to the slides and text of the presentation I gave at GDC last year - linked over on the left (also here).

Finally - a shout-out to Matthew Gallant - fellow blogger and occasional commentor here (who probably would be more frequently here if I would more frequently post) - who I also often run into in the comment threads on a lot of other great blogs (linked on the bottom right). Thanks for stopping by to say hi, Matthew... sorry I got dragged away to interviews and we didn't get much of a chance to chat.