Powerpoint Presentations Hat

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:
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board Workshop on Creative Broadband Potentials 2005
Karlsruhe, Germany.
My take on how design can influence the development of community in virtual worlds.
Mortar Board Austin Games Conference 2005
Austin, USA.
This is my keynote talk about how virtual world developers can change the real world.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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...
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.

Minor presentations:
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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).
Mortar Board Workshop on Economic Heterogenous Interacting Agents 2005
University of Essex.
Standard history+RMT+law fare, made up of slides from other talks.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board Digital Identity Forum 2005
London.
Standard introductory stuff, with some discussion at the end concerning identity issues in virtual worlds.
Mortar Board 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...
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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!
Mortar Board 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.
Mortar Board 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.


Copyright © Richard A. Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk)
5th March :\webdes~1\ m.htm