(Videogame) Business: The Next 20 Years.

I last spoke there in 2006 (when the conference was in London, Ontario), and the FuturePlay audience is a great mix of game industry professionals and university students committed to the craft of making games. The conference is sponsored by Algoma University, UOIT and ACM (which I first joined as a student in 1971!). Their blog post about my session is here.

Why the topic of planning the next 20 years of your career in games? Ikeep reading articles describing the various twists and turns of the industry from the Wall Street and Bestseller Chart points of view.

Noticeably absent are articles about the professional and personal future of people who practice our craft, aside from the stereotypical posts that proclaim "Keep your resume up to date because people get laid off a lot!"

As industry veterans I think it's our job to give people more perspective on how games career paths really work, especially now that games have become thoroughly entrenched in cultures around the world.

I've been creating games for almost 40 years, so it feels comfortable and normal to try to look ahead at the next 20 years of my career. And it can feel normal for everyone, not just long-time game developers.

Don Daglow