Monday, July 9, 2012

"A People's History of the First Person Shooter" at the No Show Conference at MIT.

If you'll be in the Boston area, come see me (and a bunch of smart people) talk about games at the No Show Conference running from July 14th to July 15th at MIT. Hopefully there'll be some kind of livestream or webcast thing available. I'll fill you in on those details when I get them.

My talk is called "A People's History of the First Person Shooter."

Now, I love stuff like 7DFPS, but I disagree with some of the reasoning behind it -- that the FPS genre, in particular, is creatively dead and requires an injection of indie ingenuity. That's wrong; indies have been working in the FPS space for nearly as long as the FPS genre has existed, and continue to make amazing innovative work.

It just plays into the fact that the popular history of the genre is largely a company history, written by the big winners.

My goal is to outline an alternate narrative of game developer history, to talk about the need and methodology for a game developer history, and to explicate some currents of thought running through the cutting edge of first person design in the indie scene.

(If you're in the New York City area instead, I highly recommend attending the annual Come Out and Play festival and the annual NYC MP3 Experiment, both at Governor's Island this coming weekend.)