Ubisoft's Clint Hocking Keynoting GameX

Organizers for the GameX Industry Summit today announced that Clint Hocking of Ubisoft Montreal will be keynoting the event. Hocking, who began his career at Ubisoft as a level designer on the original Splinter Cell, will give a keynote entitled “The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm.”  In his speech, Hocking will look at the future of gaming in light of accelerating convergence between rising technologies and competing media. He will also "explore augmented reality and the prominence of portable wireless devices and their design relevance in contrast to the linear, authored structures of previous generations of media that have been culturally dominant."

“As our media become more richly interactive and as our experience of the world becomes increasingly fragmented and parallelized, a new media culture is disintegrating the old.  Games of the future will reflect this cultural shift by themselves becoming more fragmentary, more parallelized, and less focused on rich simulation and traditional notions of immersion. My keynote talk at GameX Industry Summit will explore this idea fully,” he commented.

Not only did Hocking start on Splinter Cell, but he continued to develop the Splinter Cell franchise as lead level designer, scriptwriter, and creative director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory.  He also served as Creative Director on Far Cry 2. Additionally, Hocking remains a vocal proponent of games as an art form and he sits on the advisory board of the Montreal IGDA Chapter. GameX itself is presented by the IGDA chapters in New York, New Jersey, Boston, Baltimore and Philadelphia.

GameX is scheduled for October 24-25 in Philadelphia. Check out the event website for more information.