This year's Game Developers Conference will feature five focused summits to foster and facilitate community-building within emerging influential sectors of the game industry. These two-day and one-day single-track summits will run on the Monday and Tuesday of the GDC.



Through new user interfaces and more dedicated resources to the segment, casual games have become more advanced, and advanced games have become more accessible. The game industry as a whole is making clear efforts to appeal to the vast population beyond core gamers. At the Casual Games Summit, professionals and experts discuss hot topics in the casual games sector such as: keys to making a simple yet addictive game, originality and innovation, international opportunities, casual games in the console sector.

With ever increasing demands to develop next-generation titles and the need for developers to continually exceed consumer expectations, outsourcing has become an increasingly important tool for the videogame industry. The Game Outsourcing Summit is tailored especially for industry professionals looking to increase development resource awareness, expand their knowledge of the outsourcing sector, hone existing relationships and establish new partnerships. The summit analyzes outsourcing and off-shoring game development to offer in-depth business oriented seminars supported by research and market analysis from every region in the world.

This two-day summit will focus on nuts and bolts practices in curriculum and teaching methods for game development education. There will be two tracks, one aimed at novice educators just entering the game education genre, the second for experienced educators looking for additional tools teaching game design and development. There will be lectures, model curricula, case blasts, postmortems, interactive hands-on sessions as well as great opportunities for networking and discussion throughout the workshop. Attendees will leave with useful examples and ideas on how to best develop and/or reinvigorate game development curricula in their institution.

The Independent Games Summit features lectures, postmortems and roundtables from some of the most notable independent game creators around, including many former and current Independent Games Festival finalists. The 2008 Independent Games Summit seeks to highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions ranging from indie game distribution methods through game design topics, guerrilla marketing concepts, student indie game discussions, and much more.

The Serious Games Summit GDC spotlights the rapidly growing serious games industry that features the use of interactive games technology within non-entertainment sectors. The summit provides a forum for game developers and industry professionals to examine the future course of serious games development in areas such as education, government, health, military, science, corporate training, first responders, and social change.

The Worlds in Motion Summit is a definitive event tailored for the growing number of industry professionals and Fortune 500 companies developing interactive online spaces for both entertainment and commercial purposes. Discussion forums will delve into online worlds, social gaming and media and player created activity, providing insight for developers of all backgrounds into how the game industry is collectively building socialization into games and integrating personalization and player-generated content into gameplay—while widely accessible Web and networking tools are looking to the game industry for their way forward. The summit will also debate the future of gaming, which may lie in the convergence of these new frontiers.