Today at BazCamp YVR I gave a short presentation and demo of my "Making Worlds" project, as well as an overview of procedural content generation in general.

The slides are available for download.

Last month, I attended the Open Web Vancouver conference. Without a doubt, I thought the most interesting talk at the whole conference was Rick Falkvinge's keynote session about the Swedish Pirate Party.

You may have heard of the Pirate Party. Founded in 2006, the popular image is that of an anarchist movement that grew out of the sense of entitlement of media pirates on the internet. It is said that these people want to abolish modern copyright for purely selfish reasons. Unfortunately this is not just a tired old stereotype, but completely wrong.

Thankfully, Rick's entire session is available online. In one hour, he calmly and intelligently explains his vision. He shows that the Pirate Party's agenda is about civil liberties, and part of a discussion that has been going on for centuries. By tracing back the history of copyright, he shows a clear pattern: when new technology threatens established powers and businesses, those powers try to use legislation to protect themselves and maintain control. It started with the printing press, and continues today with the internet and file sharing technologies. He shows how we've already allowed the establishment to create legislation that tries to control its true potential, and how we need a political countermovement that represents all the interests of a free, digitally liberated society.

You can watch the entire presentation below. The slides with illustrations and stats are available as well.

Part 1:

Part 2:

I did my OSCMS talk Designer eye for the geek guy today. My main plan for this talk was to blast as much basic graphical design concepts into people's heads as possible and sort of teach some of the principles, vocabulary and methods that a lot of designers take for granted.

The response was great as far as I could tell. I also got the inevitable "How do we deal with Internet Explorer?" spin-off discussion in the questions round at the end ;).

Steven Peck recorded my session on video.

You can download the slides as PDF (36.5 MB), though because of all the graphics it's quite large. I think some sections will not be clear at all without the spoken explanation to go along with it though.