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Hello Paul: I would guess that you are planning to attend the Game Developer's Conference in Santa Clara? As it turns out, there is much more synergy than might be apparent to the casual observer between the realm of "games" and immersive, synthetic environments populated with "synthetic personality" entities. The complexity and richness of the logical lexicons inherent with advanced game development is not to be underestimated. My current activities--along the lines of self-adapting, pseudo-sentient "avatar" organisms, synergistically interacting and residing both with each other and "external" human participants--are very similar to game" forms of logical strategy development. So perhaps the word "game" is not exactly the appropriate word in the current technology stream. Games usually imply competing for some sort of "prize", or at least trying to survive some series of encountered traumas/threat events. My environments do not possess those types of event-stimuli, nor are there temporally dependant completion cycles involved, but there are still "gaming" strategies--of a more humanistic, situational context. I submit that as the population is immersed into the synthetic environment of the global-scale electronic connectivity grid they become more isolated in the "real world." This will drive the desire for "fulfillment" as an accessible commodity. The vicarious experiential "fantasy event" stream offered by characters and situational content in mono-directional, passive TV is about to be supplanted as the entertainment commodity of the near future by bi-directional interaction with synthetic personalities, and "object oriented" situational constructs. At this moment, we are poised on the edge of an "event horizon" where the boundaries between "real" physical human beings, and "pseudo-sentient" synthetic personalities will become ever more diffuse. Indeed, the desire for "safe" interaction with customizable, reconstructable "emotional xenomorphs" may become the primary source of personal fullfillment. Incidentally, even though the Contact Consortia event was relatively small, in terms of attendance, it was more than compensated for by the quality of the participants. Much of the presentation content was focused on synthetic planetoid models, various evolutionary and macro systematic development paradigms, and so on. Apparently, my conceptual organistic systems overview of the internet system--threshold of sentience "indicator" indices as a barometer of the potential for involuntary immersion into a human/global internet symbiosis, etc.--were suprisingly well received, and seemed to segue quite appropriately into the other presentations. At least if I'm a complete lunatic, I am in relatively good company. Keep me informed as to your current publishing activities. Charles |