The website isn’t updated yet, but I’ll be speaking at the Austin Game Conference next week on the Casual Game Evolution Summit: Moving Beyond Downloads panel.

I’ve heard good things about this event in the past but this will be my first time attending. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

While lots of people have talked about an aging gamer audience, this is the first article I’ve seen referring to Grandma Gamers. Apparently there is a 69 year old Grandma “Old Grandma Hardcore” who’s an avid gamer. She even has a blog. While the article itself is a good read, there’s some very interesting facts listed too:

• 19% of gamers are over 50
• 53% of gamers expect to play as much, or more than they do now in 10 years
• Adult gamers have been playing an average of 12 years

All of this is just even more proof that gaming is for much more than just “pimple faced teenagers” It is truly a mass-market medium, and progressive brands will do well to embrace this.

This probably isn’t something we’d normally blog about since Advergame developers won’t get access to this technology until a plugin developer actually incorporates it. (hint-hint Virtools, Macromedia, etc )

Local Ottawa-based company TransGaming has just released SwiftShader. This is a technology that provides a software renderer for the latest pixel and vertex shader effects. To put it in layman’s terms, with this technology developer’s can use the latest and greatest graphical goodies, and not have to worry about their users having the latest video cards, or the latest driver or DirectX version.

Oberon media has apparently licensed it for their tool-suite, so casual game developers can start using it now.

The FuturePlay conference has just finished up and I think the organizers should be very happy with what they put together.

The topics were very wide ranging from topics on academia and industry collaboration to game design and AI. My own panel on the future of Casual Games (slides to be posted soon) seemed to be quite successful as well (even though I was competing with Greg Costikyan first thing in the morning!).

One of the most interesting sessions was the Censorship panel on Friday which included most of the major players in the game censorship debate. It’s not often you can get Henry Jenkins, Dr. Craig A Anderson, and Jason Della Rocca all on the same panel. While two hours wasn’t nearly enough time for everyone to present (although John Lazet managed to get in some theatrics during his portion), the session still managed to cover some interesting issues and discussions. Perhaps the most surprising thing to me was that the session wasn’t better attended, especially when compared to the IP session that preceeded it.

The conference closed with an outstanding talk by Michael Mateas of Façade fame. He talked about the future of AI and his visions for how AI can make for better gameplay. He also outlined the basic ideas they used to develop the AI for Façade. Overall this was an outstanding session and a fitting end to a solid conference.

Update: Slides are now available.

If you are based in Europe or are looking for an excuse to visit Paris, you should consider attending the The 2005 Online Games Summit. I will be co-chairing this conference and it is being put on with the support of the IGDA’s Online and Casual Games SIGs.

We think that we’ve put together a strong lineup of speakers covering many aspects of the online games industry, ranging from MMOs to Casual Games and advergames. We’re also covering the a couple of academic related issues, and have some focus on the Asian market as well.

This should be a great show, and hopefully I’ll see some of you there.