Strange Tales From Other Worlds

At the end of last year, Michael Brunton-Spall and Jon Topper asked me if I would like to give the opening keynote at Scale Summit as I had “lots of experience scaling weird things”, by which they meant Second Life and EVE Online. I immediately thought of The Corn Field, a place in Second Life that is a reference to an episode of The Twilight Zone where naughty avatars were sent to think about what they had done. Several more bizarre anecdotes quickly came to mind and soon I had a talk: Strange Tales From Other Worlds. A few people who couldn’t make it to Scale Summit mentioned that they wanted to hear the talk, but the recording I made at Scale Summit was somewhat disapointing. Luckily I was invited to give the talk again a few weeks ago to the Oculus team at Facebook London and made a Keynote recording which I’ve now uploaded to YouTube here. The strange tales are mostly true, but a few errors snuck in to the second telling: firstly MUD stands for Multi-User Dungeon and secondly I forgot to credit Brian Bossé for his amazing work on TiDi the second time around.