Furthering the theory that Richard Garriott’s passion, drive, and talent are for taking the reigning paradigm in gaming at any given point in time and pushing it to the Nth degree, the Ultima creator will be delivering the opening keynote speech at the 2011 LOGIN Conference in May.

His topic? The Third Grand Era of Games, “about how the new era of online social games can benefit from reflection about the two grand eras which came before.”

Solo player games ruled in the 1980’s and 1990’s, MMO’s ruled in the 2000’s. We are now in a new era of gaming, defined by cheap or free to play, virally spread, casually begun game play. Each grand era has grand era has grown the market by 10X! Solo player games sold to millions, MMO to 10’s of millions, we are now reaching (at long last) a truly global audience of both genders an all ages. What lessons of history are useful, what truly new challenges await us. What will “casual online games” look like in 5 years? Richard asserts that if you are not trying to solve this problem, you will be left behind.

LOGIN, for the record, is a conference of game and software developers, and focuses primarily on advances in the business of software, and in the technology underlying it. It takes place, this year, from May 16th to 18th in Bellevue, Washington. (Garriott’s speech will be on the 17th.)

With luck, the talk will be recorded and posted online, so that I can relay it to all of you Dragons and Dragonettes at some later date.