[Smartphone & Tablet Summit] [Main Conference]Antisocial Behavior in Games: How Can Game Design Help?
Before online gaming, grown men did not have a safe environment in which they could rage incoherently at preteens; by that same token, preteens were unable to safely provoke unscrupulous adults for personal amusement.
The kindly wonderful (or perhaps “wonderfully kind”) people at the IGDA Games Accessibility SIG asked me if I would be willing to help run the group’s annual activities at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March. I couldn’t say no, and so now I get to play as a “speaker” at the 2016 conference.
It is required that all registered GDC speakers submit a few personal details, including a 150 word description of themselves so that conference attendees will have something to reference as they are searching for the next talk or meeting to drop in on. As anyone can tell from the ChadSpace website, I very much dislike writing about myself, so after 45 very long and excruciating minutes of feigned distress, I was finally able to settle on the following:
Presenter Name: Chad Philip JohnsonPresenter Email: ********@anacronist.comPresenter Affiliation: Engineer, Anacronist SoftwarePresenter Bio: Chad Philip Johnson is a Software Engineer and budding essayist at the Northern California-based company Anacronist Software. He passes his time exploiting everyday technologies in exciting and unconventional ways, with the intent of engendering solutions to contemporary software development mispractices and conundrums. He is a proponent of the Java and Scala programming languages and technologies--which are frequently dissociated from game development processes--and anything else promoting cross-platform ideals. Fortunately, Chad also likes video games a great deal and so his interests dovetail quite naturally into his current responsibilities at work which are to 01) lead the design and implementation of a new style of tools and technologies for game developers with small- to medium-sized teams, 02) partner with companies to resurrect prematurely abandoned game ideas from the past, and 03) be a ray of sunshine in a world that plays too much Candy Crush Saga and World of Warcraft.
, but right now the write-up seems to be as appropriate and ridiculous as just about anything else I could have come up with.