Women in Games 2006
Jul 18, 6:05 pm

Hello. Professor Kitt here from the University of umm ... Allard in the city of err ... Midgar. Now I, being the holder of the Nobel Prize for Gamology and clearly a very learned and fancy pants clever clogs type personage, was asked to speak at the 2006 Women in Games conference at the University of Teeside last week. I had to make a half hour speech to the assembled lecture theatre of academics, developers and industry nobility from across the globe about Frag Dolls and my experiences. I, of course, was very happy to do so and was in no way perturbed by the prospect of speaking in front of so many people. Nervous, me? Tish and nonsense!

Joanna Robinson and I

The Conference didn’t really start off all that well for me. After settling into my hotel room I thought I’d jump in the shower before heading down for the big dinner to meet all the delegates. Unfortunately there had been a mix up with the rooms and I was walked in on by the organiser of the conference and her husband. I was really very naked. Not the best start. Also it turned out the the organiser, Gabrielle, (there’s something about nakedness that gets you very quickly onto first name terms with a person) was on my table at dinner and so of course the story of me flashing said organiser quickly spread. I redeemed myself by managing to set up a complex bartering system with other tables that garnered us much red wine and how it flowed! What with the wine and all I became rather brave and in my various chats with people managed to do some pretty sweet deals. I hopefully made myself a whole bunch of Linden’s, the in-game money in Second Life, talking with Kyle Machulis from Linden Labs. Also I managed to talk to the Rare developers about putting a whole bunch of stuff I want into Viva Pinata. I hope you all like pink! 

The next day I went to all the various talks, speeches and panels and they were incredibly interesting. So much so that I hadn’t really thought much about my own speech before I was stepping on stage myself and found that I wasn’t really nervous at all! Frag Dolls is my area of expertise and ultimately there aren’t that many people better qualified to talk about it, so I’m pleased to say it went really well. Everyone there was really interested and lots of people spoke to me afterwards and have emailed me since. So there we go. I am teh winna’ at speechifying! Hopefully we can get a video up of my speech really soon and you can hear me talking non stop for a whole half an hour. I bet you can’t wait!

For an in-depth account of the conference and the various events there check out my fellow delegate and speaker Joanna Robinson’s blog