HotSoft

Future Play 2008 was this week: it’s the only annual Canadian academic computer games conference. We had about 100 people for the conference this year, again held in downtown Toronto. I think my favorite talk was by John Buchanan on sketching games: he showed some new software he was working on that allowed you to “play” a game the same day you come up with the basic design, allowing you to assess and refine the design. There were also many good research paper presentations, and some cool new ideas presented as posters. Overall, I was really struck by how diverse the games community is: from small serious games to mass market games, work on programming and work on emotion, work on evaluation and work on development process. It’s hard to think of an academic discipline that does not have an involvement in games. This presents challenges, but perhaps that is a good thing.