...To The Future! (of Entertainment)
Been a long week. The progressive lack of posting on my part is a measure of how tired I've been, which means that this week's silence was the product of near-complete exhaustion. In addition to having work due all week (and Monday and Tuesday of next week), today and tomorrow CMS is hosting the Futures of Entertainment Conference, which I'm attending and helping to organize. Oh, and I had one of my wisdom teeth taken out yesterday, too, which went smoothly, but was another straw on the camel's back.

Despite my exhaustion, however, the conference has been pretty cool. I had lunch with several of my classmates, our department head, and Paul Levitz of DC Comics, who is speaking on a panel as I write this. I also got to meet Kevin Barrett, Director of Design at Bioware (who was just on a panel about User Generated Content before this one), and chatted with him about in-game advertising, the various Theories of Fun that have been advanced in the industry, and my Clarion buddy patsquinade. It was pretty fascinating listening to him talk to my former prof Chris Weaver (founder of Bethesda Softworks), too, as a side comment on the ease of breaking the game with Oblivion's editor in Kevin's talk led to a philosophical discussion between the two on how constricted the design tools released to players should be.

The main draw of the conference, of course, isn't the specific speakers but the high level of intellectual ferment among intelligent observers and creators of media. See the C3 Blog for liveblogged updates from my prolific colleague Sam Ford. I'd give you some comments here, but I'm far too tired to post coherently about it.