I just came back from the Game Developers Conference 2008 in Austin. Wow!... I am often surprized about the relevance and aliveness of these events, based on my previous experience at GDC 2008 in San Francisco.

As expected, the GDC Austin conference brought me a lot of updated information about the industry, including what is going on in terms of new and upcoming games, game design, career opportunities, new interfaces, academic research, etc.

As always, I made good contacts and expanded my "gaming network", making new friends and colleagues throughout the event.

One of the highlights of the event was a great informal conversation I had about my research and "integral ideas" with John Romero, renowned designer of the video games Doom and Quake. Although these are some of the most violent games ever created, it seems (because it is still confidential) that he has been involved in less violent, more mature projects nowadays, probably reflecting where he is right now personally. John Romero is considered one of the greatest designers of the video game industry, and is currently involved in a series of upcoming (high-level) projects, including a MMO video game.

I recently had a great phone talk with Tracy Fullerton, Ph.D., who I am having the chance to meet soon at the Meaningful Play Conference 2008 in Michigan.

Tracy Fullerton is a game designer, educator and writer. She is also an Associate Professor at the USC School of Cinematics Arts and Director of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab - having participated as faculty advisor for the games Cloud, and flOw; and as a game designer for The Night Journey, a unique game/art project closely related to personal and spiritual development - http://tracyfullerton.com/projects/the_night_journey.html -- Great (and groundbreaking) stuff!

Here is an excerpt taken from her website www.tracyfullerton.com:

The Night Journey project is a game project conceived by Bill Viola, an internationally acclaimed artist and MacArthur fellow, which uses video game technologies to explore the universal story of an individual mystic's journey towards enlightenment. The game is being developed in collaboration with a team from the USC Game Innovation lab, including myself, Kira Perov, Scott Fisher, Andreas Kratky, Todd Furmanski, and Kurosh Valanejad.

It is well known that many of the technological advances we have access today comes from leading edge experiments in Universities and the military industry. The internet and video games are great examples of that.

Based on these historical facts, many of the advances we are seeing today in these environments will shape our daily life in the future in terms of technological interaction and use.

I recently came in contact with Diane Piepol, chair of Siggraph and who works at USC labs. She has been leading one of UCS's several projects related to virtual reality, which includes research on virtual worlds, avatar emotions, artificial intelligence, computer generated storyteling and narrative, interactive 360 holographic images, mixed reality, stress disorder virtual therapies, VR psyhcology and neuroscience, etc...

I invite you to take a look at that and just use a bit of your imagination to envision how some of these technologies could be used in the future (maybe not far from now) for deeper psychological, therapeutic and developmental means. I think video games can be a great media to bring to the popular ground some of these amazing virtual reality experiences and potentials.

Here is the link to all their projects: http://ict.usc.edu/projects/all/ -- I highly recommend checking what they have been up to!

All best,
Moses

Moses Silbiger, M.A.
www.pressplaytogrow.com
www.integraleye.com