Click Nothing

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.)

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.