Talk: "Evolution, Creationism, and Gaming"

One of the positive aspects of last year’s “Skepticism, Critical Thinking, and the Paranormal” panel was the interest it attracted for the big Gen Con Indy 2010 skeptical expansion. One of the new recruits for 2010 is one Tristan Zimmerman, who runs the excellent evolution education website EvoEdu. He’s going to give a talk titled “Evolution, Creationism, and Gaming.” I asked him to describe it:

While most of the other topics in Gen Con’s skeptic track focus on skepticism, “Evolution and Creationism in Gaming” focuses on what brings us all to Gen Con – tabletop roleplaying games. Evolution education website EvoEdu.com’s webmaster will be explaining how you can use evolution and creationism to bring life to your games! We’ll be mostly focusing on how they can inspire complex and interesting NPCs, story elements, and background to bring verisimilitude to your games. From island dwarfism to believable priests to mass extinctions, everyone will walk away with exciting ideas for their next campaign, and with a little more knowledge on what evolution is and how it works.

I’m really looking forward to this: evolution education set in a really solid gaming context. Tristan’s talk will be 30 minutes long, and he’s going to be giving it twice.

Speaking of, I’ll have a preliminary schedule of events posted here in the next couple of days.