Man, I’ve got to stop travelling. 30+ hours of travel time to get to Australia is not something I am looking forward to… I’m heading down to Melbourne for their annual developers’ conference. Of course, I am very much looking forward to _being_ there - just not _getting_ there. (As an aside, having played the great game of rugby for nearly half my life, I’ll have to sneak out of the conference to catch the World Cup final!) Anyway, I’ll be giving two lectures: one on overcoming industry issues (eg, piracy, censorship, risk aversion, quality of life, etc) and another on curriculum stuff during the academic portion. Fun.

Despite all the enjoyment I am sure to derive from my trip to Oz, I am quite saddened that I can’t attend the “State of Play” event being held in New York. I really dig all the IP, identity, culture, community type stuff. I am sure we’ll hear of more cool news, like Second Life giving their users the IP rights to characters!

Hopefully, this event does not produce any cheap-thrills style reporting that came out of last week’s Level Up academic conference. I was there during the lecture, and as Julian mentioned, it really didn’t go down like that…

Funny how game reviewers are being picked on for their lack of seriousness/maturity, yet the “grown-up” journos are far from ideal role-models…