Reality Panic

My busiest travel year yet, despite moving on from the IGDA. I’ve seen no shortage of demand to speak at conferences (actually turning down more than I can accept), and some client related travel. Here’s where I was over the past year:

• Jacksonville, FL (ASAE exec training)
• Las Vegas, NV (DICE Summit)
• Miami, FL (ASAE Great Ideas Conference)
• Halifax, Nova Scotia
• San Francisco, CA (Game Developers Conference)
• Philadelphia, PA
• Seattle, WA (DigiPen graduation)
• Copenhagen, Denmark
• Malmo, Sweden (Nordic Game Conference)
• Pittsburgh, PA (Game Education Summit + Korean Game Academy)
• Frankfurt, Germany (GAMEplaces)
• Washington DC (photo shoot)
• New Orleans, LA (SIGGRAPH)
• Toronto, ON (ASAE annual conference)
• Austin, TX (GDC Austin)
• Atlanta, GA (SIEGE)
• Washington DC
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (SBGames)
• Philadelphia, PA (GameX Summit)
• Toronto, ON (GameON:Finance)
• Montreal, QC (Montreal International Game Summit)
• Ottawa, ON

Without question, the travel highlight of the year was Rio. Wow! It’s beyond words… Hitting DICE for the first time was nice. The Miami trip had a lot of impact on me… Doing the commencement speech at DigiPen for students, moms and grandmas was truly an honor. Frankfurt was cool, but too quick. Ditto for New Orleans, though the humidity was insanely overwhelming. Also, finally nice to make it down to Austin - so much action, but I had never been previously. Anyway, each trip is special/different and I always make the most of the opportunity - both from a work and personal point of view.

2010 is starting out with a bang, with a client trip to Rome the first week of January. Then another client trip to Lima, Peru in mid-February. And, of course, San Francisco for GDC as usual.