I’m giving a PARC Forum

Bob Moore over at PARC (and of the wonderful PlayOn project) invited me to give a PARC Forum. This of course tickles me pink, because PARC is the birthplace of so much of modern computing. I now feel a lot of pressure to give a good talk!

Details on the event can be read here. It is open to the public, so stop by! The time and place: January 26, 2006, 4:00 p.m., George E. Pake Auditorium, Palo Alto, CA , USA.

And this is what I will be talking about:

The Medium That Ate the World

Games. There they are. We all know about them, at this point. We grew up on the classic board game sort. We dropped quarters at the arcade, we collected cartridges and disks; we downloaded hacks, and wrote walkthrough manuals.

Now here we are in a connected age, and the games are connected too. With all this experience, we’ve asked damn few questions about what games really are, how they really work, how they change and how we are changed by them.

Today games are not only rising in the popular culture, but are shaping the ways we think. The future of cyberspace is developing in the game world, not in the staid halls of research labs, and as a result, it is full of far stranger things than we would have imagined.

This talk will describe the core architecture of how games work, the ways in which they are revelatory of the human condition, and the blinkers that a gamist view of the world puts on. It will explore the future of games and ways in which our culture will be shaped by play.

Welcome to the medium that is going to swallow the world, and present it back to us with the forms of things unknown.