Deadline For Submissions is Fast Approaching.

The deadline to submit your extended abstract or panel/seminar for Future Play 09 @ GDC Canada is Feb 10. If you did not RSVP but still wish to submit, follow the guidelines on futureplay.org.

Submissions will be accepted until Feb 10 for extended abstracts for oral or poster presentation, seminars, panels and workshops relevant to the conference themes.

Future Play is an annual conference hosted by Algoma University of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario with support from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, located in Oshawa, Ontario. The conference focuses on three major themes: future game developments, future game impacts and applications and future game talent.

Future Play is teaming up with the Game Developers Conference Canada (R) (GDC Canada) and will be held on May 12-13th 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Registration is now open.

GDC Canada is a conference for Canadian game developers to share best practices for fostering ingenuity and quality games. The conference emphasizes studying the challenges and opportunities inherent in creating games with long-production cycles, large development teams and across multiple platforms.

Future Play 2009 at GDC Canada will provide the opportunity for leading intellectuals and industry researchers to present their findings before an audience that includes: students, game developers, government representatives, investors and academics.

We're Baack, and This Time We Brought GDC Canada WIth Us..

After five years in Michigan and Southern Ontario, Future Play, the international conference on gaming and design, is heeding the advice popularized by Horace Greeley to "go west!" Future Play is teaming up with the Game Developers Conference Canada (R) (GDC Canada) and will be held on May 12-13th 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Registration is now open.

"We're excited to be joining forces with GDC Canada," says Dr. Bill Kapralos of the University of Ontario Institute of Technology and co-chair of the Future Play 2009 committee. "We feel that the new format we will be introducing will provide leaders from both the gaming industry and academia with a unique forum to discuss the future of games and gaming."

Future Play is an annual conference hosted by Algoma University of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario with support from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, located in Oshawa, Ontario. The conference focuses on three major themes: future game developments, future game impacts and applications and future game talent.

GDC Canada is a conference for Canadian game developers to share best practices for fostering ingenuity and quality games. The conference emphasizes studying the challenges and opportunities inherent in creating games with long-production cycles, large development teams and across multiple platforms.

Future Play 2009 at GDC Canada will provide the opportunity for leading intellectuals and industry researchers to present their findings before an audience that includes: students, game developers, government representatives, investors and academics. Over the years the Future Play conference has also featured many renowned keynote speakers from the gaming field including: Don Daglow of Stormfront Studios, Academy Award winner and inventor of Perlin Noise Dr. Ken Perlin and John Lester, the creator of Second Life.

This year's conference speakers will include: Duane M. Dunfield, President of Red Hot Learning; Eric Gagnon, General Manager of Cinetek Studio; Jerry Heneghan, Founder and CEO of Virtual Heroes Incorporated; Lucie Lalumière, Vice-President Interactive with Earth Rangers; Kevin McNulty, founding partner of Coole Immersive Incorporated; Kal Shariff, CEO of Project Whitecard Incorporated; and Kenton White, co-founder and CTO of DISTIL. Researchers from a number of universities from across North America and around the world, will be presenting their work as well.

Online registration for Future Play 2009 at GDC Canada is available now on the revamped Future Play website at www.futureplay.org.

New stuff coming soon

I recorded both Ken Perlin and John Buchanan's talks at FuturePlay 2008. Instead of releasing the raw audio of these I will be turning them into two episodes of thunderbird six in the next few weeks. I of course will put them on the feed here.

Thanks to everyone at FP, it was great meeting everyone, and the talks were great. Plus, I got a bunch of new facebook and twitter followers...

Hard Rock Cafe Tonight

I have been asked to blog this by the powers that be, which sounds ominous doesn't it?

Some folks are heading over to the Hard Rock Cafe around 6 pm for dinner and beverages...

Jackie Copland's Keynote: Living The Dream

Jackie is from Electronic Arts and she is a member of the Global University Relations Team for EA.

Her talk focussed on life in the industry (specifically at EA). Her presentation included videos of EA emplyees talking about working at EA and what they expected and did not expect. My take on her talk, if you want to work in this industry be sure to know how to work with REALLY big code bases (like oh millions of lines of code) and learn to play with others. Indeed most of EA's projects involve huge teams. If you are designing a computer science curriculum that is intended to stream people towards the industry you might want to take this into account.

Enjoy Jackie's talk.

Ben Sawyer's Keynote: Are We Learning Yet?

Ben Sawyer kicked off FuturePlay 2008 with his keynote about the serious games space and he asked the question "Are we learning yet?"

My impressions from his talk are that content and context are king, you can't teach oceanography with an FPS, and you can't use the America's Army model for every problem. (I am VASTLY oversimplifying the message here...) His talk was great, so I hope you enjoy it.

Ben's talk.

Tag Your Media, Tag Your Tweets

Those of you at the conference, be sure to tag any blog posts, pics etc with "FuturePlay2008".

Oh and tag your twitter posts with #futureplay.