Following months of seraching, the International Game Developers Association has named a new executive director.

Gamasutra reports that Joshua Caulfield (left) will replace Jason Della Rocca, who departed earlier this year. Caulfield's background is in trade association management, not gaming, His previous gig was as the Executive VP of the American Machine Tool Distributors Association. He does, however, enjoy games:

I'm an avid gamer. I'm clearly not a game developer, and there's a big difference there, but I do understand the medium. I play a lot of games; I have a group and we play a lot of MMOs. I'm quite familair with the industry from a gamer's perspective. So that helps a lot...

 

I have most of the consoles, and I pull them out when I have a little alone time, but my true love is MMOs on the PC. I'm generally an RPGer. My group just got off a stint on World of Warcraft, where I play a Shadow Priest. I play the backup healer, because if the main healer goes down, your backup healer better be ready.

We're right now playing Guild Wars, and I'm playing a Monk, so I'm a healer again. I tend to do the support role a lot.

Caulfield expects to maintain a lower public profile than Della Rocca, with the IGDA board taking on the public interface role. Caulfield also talked about his vision for the game developers' organization:

The IGDA's mission has remained very much the same: That is, to support the professional game developer -- specifically, I believe, to serve individuals to create video games, to enhance the lives of game developers, to connect developers with their peers, and so on...

There are a lot of differences between a union and a professional association. I really can't say whether this industry needs a union or not, because I don't know enough about the individuals of this industry yet.