A games industry veteran a.k.a. ‘the Guvner’, Jon has been making digital entertainment for more than twentyfive years. He has an impressive depth of experience, including as an independent game developer, management consultant and also as a digital production executive. Jon was a Vice-President and GM at the World’s #1 videogame company, Electronic Arts, and Executive Producer of many hit games for EA and EA SPORTS. He sits on several advisory boards for technology companies, committees and universities in the USA
and regularly speaks at conferences about videogames, freemium, the gaming industry and game production process. Jon is also a founder of UDEN, a non-profit trade association, the Utah Digital Entertainment Network.

Publishing industries have punishing economics in which a small minority of titles produce outsize returns while the vast majority lose money. This produces understandable risk aversion in both creators and distributors. The situation is particularly severe in the game industry where the failure of a single game can easily drive a studio into bankruptcy. This can produce long dry spells of minimal innovation. I will argue that this makes the production of experimental games in universities particularly important for the long-term health of the medium. While universities are not generally good at producing polished products, their higher tolerance for risk allows them to try things that would be potentially suicidal for a game studio. In this talk, I’ll discuss the role of academia in the game development ecosystem, how we can help move the medium forward, and some of the institutional challenges that must be solved in order to do so.