Design Futures: Designing for the Future of Interactive Entertainment - Jane Pinckard, Foundation 9 Entertainment and GameGirlAdvance March 11, 2009

Video games compete for consumer attention not only with books and films, but also with the vast variety of social application across mobile and internet platforms. Designing for the future has to respond creatively to the shifts represented by the developments of social interactive spaces in digital media. What are some of the trends in consumer behavior? How can game design grow to accommodate and exploit new social media? What design principles can emerge from new social technologies, and how will they in turn influence the future of entertainment as a whole?

Jane Pinckard is a Business Development Analyst at Foundation 9 Entertainment, an independent game developer with eight studios creating games across every platform and in almost every genre. She started writing about videogames in 1997 on a Geocities page, a project which eventually evolved into the blog GameGirlAdvance, exploring games as art in a broader cultural context. She has written for a variety of publications including Theme Magazine, Xbox Nation, and Salon, and has lectured at Stanford, CCAC, and Whitman College. In 2004 she served in Lawrence Lessig's Law in Virtual Societies class at Stanford Law School as a non-resident fellow. In 2005 she co-created The 1Up Show, a weekly video internet show about game culture for the 1Up Network. In 2006 she worked on the speaker program for the Game Developers Conference, the industry's leading tradeshow for videogame developers. She has spoken at SXSW, PAX, GDC, and several other game and technology events. In her free time she writes and plays music.

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