Slides for my GDC Flashbackward segment

I hear video will be up in a few weeks, but in the meantime, here are the slides and the text for the little five minute talk I gave at GDC as part of the FlashBackward keynote.

For some reason, I felt the pressure on this talk much more than usual. Five minutes is not a lot of time, and I had a lot I wanted to say. This resulted in fifty slides. There were, all told, four hours of rehearsals, although I only attended two of them. The animations on my slides were lost along the way, and when I did my runthroughs, I botched it both times. By the time I gave the talk, my hands were shaking and I had trouble pressing the button on the clicker to advance slides with my thumb. I had to set it down and press it with my index finger. But by all accounts I nailed it, so…

As far as what it is about? Well, each of the five minute segments was covering a major trend in the last thirty years of gaming. Among the many luminaries invited to speak in the session were folks like Chris Crawford, Graeme Devine, David Jones, and Lori Cole.

In my case, I was supposed to cover MMOs. But of course, I didn’t think that I could cover MMOs without also giving due credit to the MUDs from which they sprang, or without covering the pioneers who took online worlds onto commercial services. Without talking about MUD-Dev and the astonishing influence that little community ended up having. Or, for that matter, without sounding a few warning bells about the ways in which social media companies and now VR companies are rehashing some very old problems without thinking very deeply of the human implications.

In the end, it all fit. Barely.