High Windows

This talk was the keynote for the Worlds in Motion Summit in 2008, and was a wee bit controversial at the time. Basically, it threw cold water on virtual worlds hype, and questioned our collective sense of social responsibility. The talk was originally supposed to be entitled “Why Should Gamers Care About Virtual Worlds?” which may help make sense of the first few slides.

This talk was not recorded, to my knowledge, but there are multiple good liveblogs of it out there, mostly via the Internet Archive. From these, I have pieced together captions that give a decent reconstructed overview of the talk. Hover over each slide to see the caption.

Warning, this presentation has extremely graphic imagery in it that may be very upsetting.

Additional reading

You may also want to read my follow-up blog post “Should virtual worlds change the real?”