For reasons that should become evident, I was unable to attend LOGIN this year. This meant that I missed my chance to be on a panel with Charlie Stross, one of my favorite science fiction writers, and someone I corresopnd with but have never met.

Fortunately, Charlie posted up  the text of his LOGIN 2009 keynote, which is, well, no, not as good as being there. Oh well. it’s still fascinating, though perhaps not as outre to regular readers of this blog as it might have been to many in the audience.

So, let’s look ahead to 2030.

We can confidently predict that by then, computer games will have been around for nearly sixty years; anyone under eighty will have grown up with them. The median age of players may well be the same as the median age of the general population. And this will bring its own challenges to game designers. Sixty year olds have different needs and interests from twitchy-fingered adolescents. For one thing, their eyesight and hand-eye coordination isn’t what it used to be. For another, their socialization is better, and they’re a lot more experienced.

Oh, and they have lots more money.

If I was speccing out a business plan for a new MMO in 2025, I’d want to make it appeal to these folks — call them codgergamers.

Would have posted this earlier, but my last post was BoingBoinged and made the site inaccessible to me, despite a slightly-out-of-date version of WP-SuperCache. It is now upgraded, but who knows whether that will help.