Will Wright's 2010 GameTech keynote on military gaming
Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth and The Sims, delivered a keynote at the 2010 Defense GameTech Conference on how military and commercial gaming technologies intersect, including their historical precedents.
Updated
The 2010 keynote
The Defense GameTech Users' Conference of 2010 was held March 29 to 31 at the Orlando Hilton in Orlando, Florida. Its announced keynote speakers were General Mattis, Commander of Joint Forces Command, Major General Melvin Spiese, Commander of USMC Training and Education Command, and Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. Will Wright was scheduled to speak at noon on the second day, which fell on March 30.
Wright designed SimCity, SimEarth and The Sims. His talk dealt with the intersection of military gaming and commercial gaming technologies, with historical precedents among the examples. He covered nearly 200 slides in 50 minutes, a delivery pace the coverage called remarkable. The coverage also pointed readers to an earlier piece on GameTech proceedings, titled Serious Games From Why To How.
What the talk covered
Kotaku reported on May 7, 2010, that Wright spoke to military and Department of Defense personnel about the intersection of commercial gaming and military gaming. The talk partly revisited ideas from his Game Developers Conference talk in March 2010 and added new material on the uses of gaming in military training.
The video
The full 50-minute presentation was published as a video. Wright's talk starts after a four-minute introduction, and the slides appear inside the video. The video was published through Armed With Science, which reported on the keynote under the headline SimCity Designer Presents GameTech 2010 Keynote. The slides were also offered for download as PDFs in two parts.
A talk about the common ground between military and commercial gaming sat next to keynotes from two senior military commanders and the head of a nonprofit consortium for educational technology, which gave the program a mix of defense and civilian voices.
What is true today
The conference website, gametechconference.com, no longer loads in November 2026 under any of its address forms. No working page for the 2010 video is known.
The talk is recorded here as part of the history of serious games. The three games named in the announcement of the keynote, SimCity, SimEarth and The Sims, are commercial titles and are not part of the games directory.
Questions and answers
Who gave the keynote at GameTech 2010?
Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth and The Sims, spoke at the Defense GameTech Users' Conference, held March 29 to 31, 2010, at the Orlando Hilton in Orlando, Florida.
How long was the Will Wright keynote?
The presentation ran 50 minutes and covered nearly 200 slides. The video adds a four-minute introduction before Wright begins.
Is the GameTech conference website still online?
No. The address gametechconference.com does not load in November 2026 under any of its address forms.