My Cycle of Life talk from Helsinki

I just got back from a week in Helsinki, Finland. I was there to run some game design workshops at Next Games, and do a lecture for them as part of an event they were hosting.

The request was for a talk of a similar shape to the one I gave at GDC: looking back over the history of games over the last couple of decades, identifying some cycles and trends, and discussing the ways in which those cycles were carrying us back again towards familiar territory. In particular, a huge topic of discussion all week, with many separate people from many different companies, was the way in which mobile gaming is discovering that the games need to be more social, more like games as a service; and more and more they find they must draw lessons from MMOs.

This isn’t that dissimilar to what I have been saying about social VR, either, and of course mobile is going to collide with AR given enough technological advances and time. So that was the skeleton of the talk.

But I was particularly struck by the fact that Helsinki itself, where there seem to be mobile game companies every two blocks, where mobile devices were pushed to the mass market by Nokia, where Angry Birds and Clash of Clans were born, seems to be perhaps the exact right fertile ground for these sorts of lessons to be heeded. Which gave me great optimism, because frankly, I am used to lessons being ignored instead!

Alas, there is no recording, and I spoke off the cuff using the slides as a skeleton, so there is no transcript nor video. You’ll just have to imagine many interesting anecdotes, snarky remarks about EA and other big companies, praise for the lessons of Habbo Hotel, and more, ending with an inspiring call to arms to take up the responsibility and challenge of building online communities — before heading to the bar for flights of vodka.

See the slides and some pictures of the event here.