Proceedings of the International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology, Vancouver, BC, Canada, May 06 - 07, 2010

It is our great pleasure as chairs to welcome you to the Future Play 2010 International Academic Conference on the Future of Game Design and Technology in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada! Future Play 2010 is being hosted by Algoma University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) at the Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, May 6-7 2010. Future Play 2010 is the place to explore groundbreaking ideas alongside some of the world's most interesting games researchers and developers. Future Play once again aims to foster thought-provoking and industry-changing ideas. Our objective is to provide an atmosphere for discussion and networking between researchers, educators, industry professionals, government representatives, and students to advance the game industry by focusing on three main themes. The first theme, future game development, addresses academic research and emerging industry trends in the area of game technology and game design. The second theme, future game impacts and applications, includes academic research and emerging industry trends focused on designing games for learning, for gender, for serious purposes, and to impact society. The third theme, future game talent, is designed to provide a number of industry and academic perspectives on the knowledge, skills, and attitude it takes to excel in the games industry. Future Play 2010 addresses these themes through thought-provoking peer-reviewed research paper sessions, including presentations and a poster session. Future Play 2010 evolved from the former Computer Game Technology (CGT) Conference, initiated and presented by Algoma University beginning in 2002. Future Play is now presented annually, and brings together academics, industry leaders, government officials and students to consider new directions in computer game technologies and explore groundbreaking visions for the future of game development. Since 2009, Future Play 2010 has partnered with the Game Developers Conference® (GDC) Canada. Game Developers Conference® Canada is a collaborative forum studying the challenges and opportunities of creating games with long production cycles, large development teams, and multi-platform releases. GDC Canada builds off the success of the Vancouver International Game Summit and will be a forum for Canadian developers to share best practices for fostering excellence and quality games within their region and distributed globally. GDC Canada will feature a keynote address from Bill Mooney, Vice-President of the San Francisco-based social games developer Zynga, General Manager of FarmVille.