2008 Game Developers Conference (GDC) organizers have announced that renowned futurist Ray Kurzweil (pioneer in speech recognition technology) will give the GDC’s keynote speech in February titled “The Next 20 Years of Gaming” – a look at the next two decades of video games and what the landscape may look like come GDC 2028.

Honestly, I’m looking forward to Kurzweil’s speech but, with that said, I started thinking about other keynote speeches I’ve heard over the past year and how the gaming related talks have all kinda started to sound the same.

I almost thought about summarizing the top three common themes when I came across a post titled Five Short Video Game Industry Keynote on the Magical Wasteland’s blog. These guys have done a much better job pulling this together than I would have done, for example gaming keynote theme number one:

Let’s think about the future for a second. You probably don’t understand the kids that make up the bulk of our audience, but I do. I call them the network MySpace remix 3.0 social generation. Unlike any other people before them, young people today like to interact with each other. They also like music. YouTube is the perfect example of whatever point it is I’m making. Everything should be online and customizable.

You’ll have to click on the link above to read of the other four keynotes – they’re really funny (and spot on).