The Game Developers Choice Awards have named the recipients of two of the special awards. Electronic engineer Ralph Baer, known to many as the “Father of Video Games” for inventing the first home video game system, commercialized as the Magnavox Odyssey game system, will receive the Pioneer Award; and Jason Della Rocca, Executive Director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), a professional society committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers, will receive the Ambassador Award. Find out more at www.gamechoiceawards.com

Posted by at 4:31 PM | Permalink

Hello! While I had been saving this particular announcement for Christmas Day, the team convinced me to open this package a few days early.

Ralph Baer, who created the world's first video game console, will be giving a postmortem on the device and its first game, PING PONG. During the same session, Allan Alcorn, who later designed Atari's PONG for the arcades, will also present a postmortem of that device and game. Talking and working with these gentlemen on developing this session has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life, and I can only imagine the impact this session will have on everyone attending. The session is titled, appropriately enough, How to Create an Industry: The Making of the Brown Box and PONG.

Of course, GDC also features the Game Developers Choice Awards. Granted there are many awards shows out there, but this one, like the GDC itself, is built on the input of professional game developers. It's this open, peer-based structure that lead developers to truly appreciate these awards. This year, the Choice Awards are going through a couple of changes. We are consolidating the First Penguin and Maverick awards into a single Pioneer award, celebrating an individual responsible for a breakthrough in the game industry. Inventing that industry certainly qualifies, and so we are honored to give out our first Pioneer Award to Mr. Baer while he's at GDC.

Another new category is the Ambassador Award, which honors an individual who advances the game industry from within, or reaches outside as an advocate. As games take a more prominent role on the global stage in popular culture, politics, and the media, it became more important for us to recognize our unsung heroes who fight the good fight. Again, we are proud to announce a winner who defines the category by example, the executive director of the IGDA, Jason Della Rocca. Jason tirelessly fights for quality of life, accessibility, and creative freedoms, and we are pleased to give him the thanks he deserves.

The timing here is perfect. Not only are we creating this award now for an emerging area of recognition, but this is the first time Jason has been eligible to win a Choice Award. Our colleagues at Gamasutra.com are stepping up to handle general voting management and special awards committee management. They're replacing our friends at the IGDA, who are now free to focus on their advocacy and training activities at GDC, which also opens IGDA staff for recognition. While I'm on this point, I would like to thank our in-house Renaissance man Simon Carless and the Choice Awards Advisory Committee for their objective deliberations in managing the voting process.

A press release detailing these announcements should follow this morning. Now just wait until you hear who's getting our Lifetime Achievement Award!

Happy Holidays,

Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference

p.s. Please remember to vote in the Game Developers Choice Awards. We'll be back with a new update on Wednesday January 2.

Posted by at 9:17 AM | Permalink

Good morning! In the spirit of the holidays, we're debuting a handful of sessions today focused on some of our favorite games.

Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson worked on ELDER SCROLLS IV: OBLIVION together, and are giving a talk on Collaborative Writing and Vast Narratives: Principles, Processes, and Genteel Truculence. Writing frequently has a black box aura to it, and being able to apply a reliable process to something as purely creative as writing is a model that should be relevant to any discipline in game development. Plus, if you've ever met Ken and Mark, you know you're in for an incredibly mind-altering time!

Rob Pardo, Vice President of Game Design for Blizzard and a member of our advisory board, has kindly agreed to present a talk on tuning for player to player experiences, in a session titled Rules of Engagement: Blizzard's Approach to Multiplayer Game Design. Chris Hecker makes the strong point that AI is the ultimate technical challenge in creating athentic experiences in games, but then the ultimate AI is that which isn't artificial at all, but consists of real people in real time. Rob has had the opportunity to iterate on best practices for online multiplayer over several successful titles such as WORLD OF WARCRAFT, and will present some of the lessons learned and applied forward.

Finally, in what is shaping up to be one of the most coveted games of 2008, we have a revealing session by Haden Blackman, Executive Producer for LucasArts, titled STAR WARS: THE FORCE UNLEASHED: How LucasArts is Building a Game, a Development Team and a Technology Pipeline... At the Same Time. This session has been a long time coming, in that the converged pipeline story has been presented in many ways but rarely with proof behind it. Finally, we will learn what worked and what required a Force push to combine Industrial Light and Magic, LucasArts, Euphoria, and a Star Destroyer, across both the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

Since next Tuesday is Christmas Day and the following Tuesday is New Year's Day (why did I pick Tuesdays?), I'll post again this Thursday, with a very special holiday treat, and again on Wednesday January 2. In the meantime, please check out the Game Developers Choice Awards and register your nominations, your colleagues rely on your professional opinion to win!

Cheers,

Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference

Posted by at 9:37 AM | Permalink

Join us as we celebrate innovation in mobile games during the IGF mobile competition. This event will take place during the GDC Mobile 2008 conference and will be highlighted at the main IGF 2008 awards.

The Independent Games Festival Mobile website now includes a full list of finalists. Access screenshots and links to videos and demonstration versions where available. Finalists were chosen from a field of over 50 entries, with nominations led by titles including Punch Entertainment's social networking game Ego and Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab's waste disposal strategy puzzle game Backflow.

All games will be showcased for play at the IGF Pavilion during GDC 2008! Click here to view the full list of finalists today!

Posted by at 4:39 PM | Permalink

Good morning! Let's get right to it. A characteristic of the GDC is that it enables leading developers to share their experiments with their peers. Typically, this is presented as a postmortem of a compelling aspect of a released game. Ken Levine's Storytelling in BIOSHOCK talk, already posted to the GDC website, is a great example.

Yet one of the things we're seeing more is the interest in developers to present theory and example in the context of an unreleased game, thereby advancing the edge of GDC's learning forward several months into the future. This collision of past, present, and future is evident in Peter Molyneux's talk, FABLE 2 The Big Three Features Revealed, just posted moments ago. As you may recall, Peter revealed at GDC 07 the introduction of man's best friend into the experience of his new epic. However, as many of you know, Peter is an incredibly thoughtful and prescient creator, with both the genre-creating POPULOUS and BLACK & WHITE under his belt. Given that background, he has a collection of ideas that he's looking forward to presenting. Furthermore, he will present the design concepts live, in-game, to provide the level of proof one gets from a traditional GDC postmortem.

Another example is one that represents a running theme at GDC, which is the collaboration between film and games. When Neil Young announced that EALA would be working with Steven Spielberg, it signaled a change in the landscape of Hollywood collaboration. By bringing AAA talent from both worlds together, this partnership has the potential to produce experiences that combine the best of both worlds.

The first result of this collaboration -- a Wii puzzle game -- is almost here, and executive producer Lou Castle has graciously agreed to share his experiences co-developing the game, in a session titled Creating Steven Spielberg's Will Puzzle Game. Yet, Lou is an extraordinary creative leader in his own right, having created the COMMAND & CONQUER series, and we got even more confirmation of it at our stealth studio head event, GDC Prime. We asked him to share some of the zero-documentation, heavy prototyping, and failure-friendly principles that resulted in a highly efficient design and production process. We think this session will be well worth your time.

Stay tuned for additional must-attend session announcements next Tuesday!

Cheers,

Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference

Posted by at 9:51 AM | Permalink

Good morning! It's Tuesday, so that means we have some more GDC news to share with you, this time focusing on the rapidly evolving world of MMOs.

Dave Jones, the creator of Lemmings, Blood Money, the original Grand Theft Auto and the Xbox 360 hit Crackdown, will be giving an MMO design theory talk at GDC 08. While the first three credits were under the classic DMA Design banner influencing a generation of games and game designers, Dave and his team have been hard at work on breakout innovation in modern game design at his Realtime Worlds, where he presides as CEO and Creative Director.

Now, none of these titles is an MMO. However, I recently had a chance to catch up with Realtime Worlds' Mario Rizzo, whom you may recall from his pioneering work on the EverQuest games. He and the team have been kind enough to clue me in as to the goings on at Realtime, and all I'm going to say here is that the GDC audience is in for a real treat. While there is some information out there, I'd encourage you to also scrutinize Dave's description of his talk for clues:

My First MMO

Another proven, veteran developer is Raph Koster. In Raph's case, he's already had the chance to design huge groundbreaking MMOs such as Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. But now he's through the looking glass. We caught up around his presentation at TechCrunch 40, and he shared the structure of his new venture, Metaplace. He modestly described it as a cross-platform standard for anyone to develop their own online worlds and games. As he continued, I slowly realized that he was effectively describing the holy grail of games, namely a game experience that can be shared on multiple platforms by players anywhere (the game equivalent of hydrogen cars) as well as the holy grail of the Web 2.0 industry, namely a user created experience that can retain loyalty through community interaction and fun (the open web equivalent of WoW).

The game industry has admittedly lagged behind YouTube and social networking sites in creating what Sulka Haro calls "gamer created activity" -- even though we have the edge in interface and gameplay design. At this year's GDC, we intend to rebalance things on that front, starting with Raph's postmortem of his game/platform/community. Maybe we can invent some new words too to describe these experiences, but for now we'll start with how they're made:

Metaplace Postmortem: Reinventing MMOs

On a slightly different note, we'd like to remind everyone who attended GDC in 2007 that your discounted alumni rate is still available through end of day tomorrow, through your e-mail link. Thank you for your continued support!

Cheers,

Jamil Moledina
Executive Director
Game Developers Conference

Posted by at 10:40 AM | Permalink