Montreal ACM SIGGRAPH presents

Video games are arguably the most compelling and lucrative examples of “interactive techniques”. Their success, evaluated by a world-wide population of players, depends not only on technology and artistic abilities, but also on production practises and, growingly, on business issues. With video games now firmly established as “big business”, the context in which they are being developed has changed dramatically. Dr. John Buchanan, from industry giant Electronic Arts, will give us some glimpses into the dynamics of this industry, and consider how it is affecting the way games are being created.

We are all excited about “pushing the barrier” towards better games, but it is getting less and less clear as to what exactly this direction should be. With current games approaching near-photographic picture quality, are technological parameters, such as memory size, bandwidth, CPU speed or rendering capacity, really the bottleneck anymore? Who cares about the next-generation consoles if individuals can’t afford to take risks and explore the unanticipated opportunities they might make available?

Games are created by people, and in today’s world, by people working together in increasingly large groups. The successful coordination of large teams and the many human issues that go along with this are becoming increasingly critical factors in “making better games”. How important will the sharing of stories and experiences become, compared to discussions of feature sets and artistic assets?

We leave John with the difficult task of addressing these issues, in his own particular open-ended style, as well as the many more that will either occur to him in mid-sentence or be suggested to him by the audience.

Fired from his first job for playing video games Dr. John Buchanan is now the University Liaison officer for Electronic Arts. After getting fired from his job as a janitor John went to the University of Windsor where he pursued a double honors degree in mathematics and computer science. In his last year there he wrote a shareware game. This game grossed 10$. Unsatisfied with his first attempt to break into the video game market he proceeded to do his MSc at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Dr. Ron Baecker. Then a small trip west and north ended in Vancouver where John pursued his PhD under the supervision of the late Dr. Alain Fournier. In 1993 realizing that he had traveled as far west as he could without swimming he headed back east and north to Edmonton where he spent five years as an Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta. There he investigated the use of computers to generate Non Photorealistic Images. After this he took a leave to visit Radical Entertainment, a video game company, in Vancouver. Two months later he joined Electronic Arts Canada as the senior research scientist of a three person research group. He was then Director, Advanced Technology for the Canadian studio and University Liaison Officer for the company world wide. Since 2002 he is working full time as the University Research Liaison Dude for the whole company.