Next week is Develop in Brighton, the UK’s premiere games industry conference, and I’m going to be involved in two sessions there.

The first session is part of “Evolve“, a single day before the conference proper combining their old online and mobile tracks into something more focused on the edges of the games industry – so now including social and casual gaming as well.

With a panel of industry experts, I’ll be asking the question “What Do Social Networking Sites Have To Offer The Games Industry“:

Facebook and Myspace each have over 100m unique users. The users of these sites are not only coordinating their leisure time through them, but spending their leisure time on them, and even playing games on them. What does that mean for the games industry? How can traditional games and game companies engage with the social networks – their users, their platforms, and the core gamers already using them? Are Facebookers casual-gamers-in-waiting? This panel invites representatives from top social networks to explain what gaming means for their products, and how they can support your efforts as games developers.

Hopefully, given the panel’s strengths and expertise, we can come up with some wide-ranging – and interesting – answers.

In addition to that, as part of the conference proper, I’m going to be talking about Games As A Service: what service design is, what it means for games and products of the future, and how some of the territory Schulze & Webb has been exploring when it comes to unproduct might apply to games. It’s called Never Mind The Box: Games As A Service:

The effort and finances needed to build full retail games is growing unsustainable. But what if you weren’t making a product? What would Games As A Service look like? Services encourage loyalty; they turn products into platforms; they empower users; they play well with others and connect to existing services; and at the large scale, they wrap other products and become super-products. Using examples from inside and outside the games industry – from tiny, open-source Davids to console-licensed Goliaths – Tom Armitage examines already successful notions of service design and explores what it will mean for your games, big or small.

So that’s next week, then. Better start writing them. And if you’re going to be at Develop next week – do come say hello!

Writing up talks is hard work. Anyhow, I thought you’d be interested to know that my talk from Gamecity ‘08, the Nottingham game festival (which was, frankly, excellent) is now available online for you to read. I was due to give a talk to a more general audience than I normally do, so I decided to run with a slightly more general topic, and imagined a 45-year-old standing for office as a premier in 2018:

They’re 45 in 2018 when they stand for office – that means they were born in 1973. They would have been four when Taito released Space Invaders came out; seven when Pac Man came out. In 1985, when they were 12, Nintendo would launch the NES in the west. At 18, just as they would have been heading to University, the first NHL game came out for the Genesis/Megadrive and might consumed many a night in the dorm. At 22, the Playstation was launched. At 26, they could have bought a PS2 at launch, ; 22 when the Playstation came out; 26 when they bought a launch PS2. At 31, they might have taken up World of Warcraft with their friends.

They would have been a gamer all their lives. Not someone who once played videogames, trotting out the same anecdote about “playing Asteroids once” in interviews; someone for whom games were another part of their lives, a primary, important medium. Someone who understood games.

And if that was the case, what might they have learned?

The resulting thoughts were interesting, and led to some good discussion and (I think) some happy audiences. I hope you enjoy it too.

Read the full talk here; feedback, as ever, is welcome.

Quick heads-up about two upcoming events:

first, I’m going to be talking at Playful, a one-day event run by Pixel-Lab as part of the London Games Fringe. It’s got a fabulous line-up, is at the beautiful Conway Hall, and is a steal at twenty-five quid. If you’re wondering whether or not you should go, then yes, you should. If you’re wondering what I’m doing there: a short twenty-minute session (as they all are, in fact), entitled Everything Is Multiplayer Now. It’s a remixed, rejigged, and heavily updated take on some of the ideas in Playing Together.

I’m going to shoot off shortly after I’ve spoken there – not because of the quality of the afternoon line-up, because let’s face it, it’s cracking – but because I’m making my way to Nottingham for the remnants of Gamecity, a three-day games festival (that begins on Thursday the 30th). It’ll be a shame to miss the first day, but I’m hoping to catch Jonathan Coulton and his Zombie Choir, not to mention the excellent events on Friday and Saturday.

As part of that, I’ll be giving a lunchtime session on Saturday, in the Mogal-e-azam Indian restaurant. That’s going to be entitled “A World Run By Gamers“. The brief precis I supplied looked something like this:

It’s more likely than ever that in the coming years, people with power – political, industrial, corporate, technical – will have played videogames. And not just had a passing experience with them; they may actually be what we might term “gamers”. In the coming years, the world will face such as impending recessions, peak oil, and global warming (not to mention all manner of other difficulties over the horizon). And it’s not just impending disaster; there are all manner of positive challenges we’re going to have to rise to. What have videogames taught the leaders and innovators of tomorrow? What are the necessary skills for the 21st century that gamers have been learning for years? What can we learn from games, and what can gamers – and game designers – take to other industries and sectors? Tom will examine these questions with reference to MMOs, football management, survival horror, twitch-shooters, beat-em-ups, and more, with barely the briefest reference to SimCity.

Which, you know, could be interesting. And if it’s not, then the food will be good (and you know the rest of the festival will be awesome).

So: end of the month, lots of stuff about games in London and Midlands, and that’s where I’ll be.