The Future of Gaming
Michael Vance - Activition
Feb. 14, 2025, 2:30 p.m. - Feb. 14, 2025, 3:30 p.m.
MAASS 217
Hosted by: Paul Kry
In The Future of Gaming, we will discuss some possible shapes for the hardware and software architecture of gaming ten years from now. Will traditional consoles continue to blend into the larger PC and mobile gaming landscape? How will cloud compute and data center capabilities inform which platforms are most successful? How will ML techniques inform our work?
Michael Vance is a Senior Vice-President and Fellow Software Engineer at Activision. He received his B.Sc in Computer Science in 1999 from Pennsylvania State University’s Schreyer Honors College. His first job in the games industry was in the niche field of Linux game development as part of the start-up Loki Software. He later began working at Treyarch before its acquisition by Activision in 2001. As a technical director he has led engineering teams on Spider-Man 2, Spider-Man 3, and Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, and as a Technical Fellow contributed to almost a dozen other titles as well as each of the Call of Duty series from 2011’s Modern Warfare 3 to Black Ops 6. He was also the Chief Technology Officer of Activision for several years before returning to programming. He resides in Falmouth, ME, where he also raises goats and chickens when not volunteering for the Falmouth Land Trust.
