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These are powerpoint presentations I've given over the years, in .pdf
format. Most share slides, and some are basically the same talk given
to different audiences. I've divided them into major and minor, depending
on how much original content there is in them (which may or may not reflect
the importance of the audience - some of the most high-powered people
only wanted a general overview of the issues).
Major presentations:
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SELFWARE.games 2003 Graz, Austria.
SELFWARE was a conference concerned with identity, sponsored
with EU money (Graz had a ton of it to give away as it was
European Capital of Culture that year). This was the first
occasion I described to anyone my ideas for relating virtual
world player type theory to Campbell's monomyth.
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Community Work: Managing Multiplayer Culture 2004 Information Technology University, Copenhagen, Denmark.
This is the talk in which I first developed my ideas of
the cultural effect of virtual worlds on real-world
culture.
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Other Players 2004 Information Technology University, Copenhagen, Denmark.
In this talk, I give my assessment of how virtual world design is becoming
dumbed down because of the need to attract newbies.
The formal paper version is here.
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Media Technology Industry 2005 Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
This is the talk in which I expound my ideas for
how virtual worlds will develop in future. It proved to
be a good source of slides for later, minor presentations.
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Command Lines 2005
University of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
This is my explanation of why you can't have
true player governance of virtual worlds as people
usually envisage it.
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Workshop on Creative Broadband Potentials 2005 Karlsruhe, Germany.
My take on how design can influence the development of community in virtual worlds.
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Austin Games Conference 2005
Austin, USA.
This is my keynote talk about how virtual world developers can
change the real world.
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Game Focus Germany 2007 Hannover, Germany.
This is quite a deep talk about the effects
of virtual worlds on real-world cultures
(and vice versa). Its point was made rather
too subtly, though: most people seemed to get
the impression I was merely arguing for
localisation, which is of course what they do
in Germany the whole time. It also suffered
because I advocated exporting German culture,
which is apparently a touchy subject in
Germany as it has connotations of the Nazi
era; in my defence, I did send the slides to
the organisers some weeks prior to the day of the
talk so they could flag any such gaffes, but
they OKed it as it stood.
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Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2007 Minneapolis, USA.
In this keynote speech, I draw parallels with the
state of textual worlds at this stage of development,
and urge today's independent developers to keep the
faith.
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Gamelab 2007 University of Oviedo, Spain.
Although this talk does begin with the usual
work-backwards-from-today history lesson and
incorporates several pieces of other talks, it
expands into a wider discussion of the origin
of virtual worlds that makes some attempt to explain
why it is that today's efforts pretty well all
descend from MUD rather than some other
source.
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Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2008 Minneapolis, USA.
In this keynote speech, I look at three different
possible futures for virtual worlds, and place
my bet on which is going to be the one we get.
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Digital Interactive Symposium 2008 Edinburgh.
This talk is a rant about the state of computer games education in
the UK. In it, I manage to insult just about everyone involved in the
subject in one way or another...
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Computer Games/Players/Game Cultures 2009 Otto Von Guericke University, Magdeburg.
In this talk, I discuss the problems that can arise when the designer's
view of the moral tone of a virtual world differs from that of the
players.
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Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2009 Las Vegas, USA.
In this keynote speech, I explain how we can
improve today's MMORPGs by casting aside old rivalries
that many designers aren't even aware have influenced them.
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Digital Games Research Association 2009 Brunel University.
This keynote lists a number of things I don't want to see any more in
MMORPG research, and ends with pointer to what I do want to see.
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Minor presentations:
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Online Games 2001 London.
This was one of the last of the talks I gave
at annual business conferences. Those were the days when
virtual world people rubbed shoulders with web game providers,
mobile phone developers and the occasional gambling
advocate. This isn't a particularly special set of slides,
although I do support persona death in one of them.
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IEE Seminar 2002 University of Essex.
Unusually, this is not a talk about virtual worlds. I was
asked to give an evening seminar to the Institute of Electrical
Engineers about mobile phone games (having designed several,
some of which were actually made), so that's what I did.
It's somewhat dated now, but was correct in 2002. The title
slide is as dreadful as it ever was.
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ESE Seminar, 2002 University of Essex.
This is a talk to the Electronics Department about
virtual world architecture. It's a bit more
hardware-related than the presentations I usually give.
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ESE Seminar 2003 University of Essex.
This is the presentation I gave to tell my soon-to-be colleagues what
it was I'd be teaching. It's the whole player types to Hero's Journey story,
albeit not in a huge amount of detail.
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International Conference on Computer
Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education 2004 Microsoft Campus, Reading.
I talk here about the implications of the Hero's
Journey on the elder game of virtual worlds.
It was at this conference that I came to understand
the full horror of the lack of understanding UK
academics have of computer games.
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Law Seminar 2005 University of Essex.
I gave this seminar to Essex University's
Law Department, or rather a bunch of its
MSc students. It does cover a wide range of material
about virtual worlds and law, most of which is real
frontier stuff. The audience was supposed to comprise
of people interested in all aspects of "cyber law".
I wasn't invited back...
I gave an updated but
much shorter version of the talk a couple
of years later at the University of Teesside.
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Digital Money Forum 2005 London.
Standard introduction with a rather more extended
than usual discussion of real-money trading and
associated ideas at the end. This conference
was attended mainly be etailers and the like, with
me as one of the "interesting tangent"
type of speaker. Nevertheless, this lead to a
number of similar talks at other such commercial
get-togethers (and explains why so many of the
presentations in this section are similar).
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Workshop on Economic Heterogenous Interacting Agents 2005 University
of Essex.
Standard history+RMT+law fare, made up of slides from other talks.
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WAAG Society 2005 Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
This is a large chunk of my AGC
keynote, but with the focus on olde tyme hacker culture
and how, through virtual worlds, it (deliberately) influences
real-world culture.
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Digital Identity Forum 2005 London. Standard introductory stuff, with some discussion at the end
concerning identity issues in virtual worlds.
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Family Taster Day 2006
University of Essex.
This was a talk intended for an audience of people
local to the Colchester area, who could come to the
university for a taste of what's on offer. I sewed
together the standard introduction and history
segments of existing talks to explain Essex University's
connection with the hip and happening topic of virtual
worlds. Sadly, the audience was virtual, too: insufficient
people showed interest in attending Family Taster Day and
the event was cancelled. Still, here are the slides I
would have given had I had the opportunity to do so...
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Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation 2006 London.
This is the standard intoduction to virtual
worlds, plus some discussion of the issued raised
by real-money trading. The audience was a very
strong group of bankers, insurers, members of
government authorities and other thinkers from the
world of finance.
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Creative Clusters 2006 Gateshead.
Standard introduction to virtual worlds with a
gee-lookit-the-figures-involved spin, presented
to an audience of policy-makers working in
the creative industries.
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Telecommunications Seminar 2007 University
of Indiana, Bloomington, USA.
This is an extensive talk that covers a great
deal of virtual world theory, which I gave to
the Telecommunications Department at the University of Indiana.
It's an updated version of a talk I'd given at the
University of Teesside the previous year.
Most of the audience were savvy in the ways of
virtual worlds, so I was able to dive into the
subject in depth. It's very long, though, so I
prepared a shorter version, too.
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Postgraduate Games Conference 2008 Brunel University.
As I was talking primarily to postgraduates, I put together
this talk as a morale booster. I don't know if it worked, but
I myself came away feeling better for it!
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Living Game Worlds 2008 Georgia Tech., 2008.
I was invited to sit on a panel of not-dead-yet virtual world pioneers (me, Randy Farmer,
Pavel Curtis, Brian Green), and by way of introducing myself was asked to give a short presentation.
This is it.
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ENISA-FORTH Summer School 2009 Crete, 2009.
This summer school covered a wide variety of issues to do with network and
information security (including privacy). I was there to talk about the specific
problems virtual worlds have in this area. I spoke for about 50% longer than I was
supposed to, and although much of what I said was already known to the MMO
industry (hence my classification of it as a minor presentation) it was quite
new to most of the audience.
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