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The Next Generation of Player

So I am finally posting the slides and other presentation matertials for my Generations talk.

The talk is about the current shift in player demographics taking place in population of gamers and game developers.

I originally gave the talk in Vancouver as a Keynote to Vancouver Film School's Game Design Expo back in the beginning of Febraury.

I also gave the talk to the IGDA Chapter here in Montreal at the beginning of March. The IGDA Montreal Chapter has a write-up of the talk here (thanks Caroline), and they're also linking a full video of the entire talk, here - it's actually hosted on Motionbox, here.

For those who don't know, I have been laid up with a herniated disk in my lower back for the past month. I was supposed to be going down to GDx in Savannah a couple weeks ago to give the talk there as well, but my injury regretably prevented the travel. Thankfully with the slides, text and now a full video, anybody can see the presentation at their own leisure.

One final note for you number crunchers out there: the talk presents - in rapid-fire format - a lot of graphs based on data pulled down from the US Census Bureau which I harvested here and then aggregated. I have included in the ZIP file all of my datafiles and the graphs that were generated from them. The data is included as notepad files, whcih were then imported into excel to make the XLS file.

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.

Futureplay and Toronto

Just got back from the Futureplay 2006 conference in London, Ontario yesterday, where I got to give my first ever keynote. That was pretty exciting. The other keynote speakers were Justin Roche, Sheri Graner Ray, Don Daglow, and Ken Perlin, so very flattering to be among that roster.

I gave the same presentation the following night to the Toronto IGDA chapter, who quickly managed to get up a summary, here (thanks to Jason MacIsaac and Josh Druckman for all their hard work) Some cool folks there I got to chat with over beers after.

It was also good to give a quick plug to Ubi's currently running National Game Design Challenge. I missed a chance to blog about it during my recent trip to Vancouver when we launched the contest and associated promotion and recruiting campaign, but yeah getting to bounce around Canada with Fred made for a fun (though busy) fall.