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The GDC Vault service
has debuted several free videos from the Game Developers Conference
2011, featuring Playdom's Raph Koster on whether social games are truly
social, a rant on game AI, and a retrospective look at the forces behind
the successful Humble Indie Bundle.

These talks join recently-debuted free videos from GDC founder Chris Crawford, Bungie's David Aldridge, and Maxis veteran Stone Librande, as well as the much-watched classic postmortem series as part of GDC 2011's 'free recordings' section on GDC Vault.

The following free lectures include highlights from the conference's
notable Summits, which covered topics such as social and online games,
AI, independent games, and more.

The first talk offered for free is a lecture from Playdom's Raph Koster dubbed, "Social Mechanics for Social Games." In this session, Koster picks apart the interpersonal interactions that take place within online social titles.

As he notes in his talk, "Many have accused social games of not
really being social. But they are underpinned by many classic social
mechanics that drive interaction and community-building. Some of these
have been proven to work in other genres such as MMOs and are beginning
to filter into the social games market; others are easily visible and
quite familiar in real life, but have yet to be seen in the design of
social games."

GDC Europe organizers have detailed the 2011 show's Independent Games Summit, which includes lectures from Amnesia's Thomas Grip, B.U.T.T.O.N. developer Douglas Wilson, and many more.

Taking place Monday through Wednesday, August 15-17, 2011 at the Cologne Congress-Centrum Ost, GDC Europe
-- alongside the major gamescom trade show -- will again provide the
essential pan-European perspective of game development and business
trends.

New to the conference this year is the Independent Games Summit,
which will feature lectures and panels from the most influential
figures from the indie games space on topics covering game design,
business strategies, marketing, and more.

The notable sessions, panels, and lectures featured in the Independent Games Summit include the following:

- In "Beyond Fun: Perspectives on Video Games as Expressive Experiences," a panel of indie developers will argue that video games, just like
literature or film, can provide audiences with complex and satisfying
emotions in addition to the shallow "fun" offered by competitive games.

Speakers at the panel will include Tale of Tales' Michael Samyn (The Path), Stout Games' Jeroen D. Stout (Dinner Date), Moboid's Heather Kelley (GAMMA), thechineseroom's Dan Pinchbeck (Dear Esther), and Frictional Games' Thomas Grip (Amnesia: The Dark Descent).

- In addition to speaking in the previous panel, Thomas Grip will also give a lecture dubbed "Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success by Breaking All the Rules,"
in which he will outline the unconventional design decisions his team
made when creating the company's popular indie horror title Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

The game abandons fail states and other horror game staples, and Grip will explain why these omissions made Amnesia
more enjoyable to play. Moving beyond the context of his own game,
Grip will also discuss how these sorts of unusual design choices can
benefit games of other genres.

GDC Europe organizers have announced that wooga founder and CEO Jens Begemann will give a keynote for the conference's Business & Marketing track, offering insight into the development of free-to-play, browser based social games.

This keynote is the first to be announced for the 2011 Game Developers Conference Europe, which will take place August 15-17, and is located in Cologne, Germany alongside gamescom, the leading European trade and consumer show.

Begemann will examine the methods and design principles that go into the creation of the most popular free-to-play titles on social networks, such as Wooga's own Diamond Dash and Happy Hospital.

The Berlin, Germany-headquartered firm, which just received $24 million in funding, currently holds the third largest number of active game users on Facebook worldwide, with almost 30 million monthly unique players.

"Wooga's success is a testament to Europe's pervasive social and browser games economy, and Jens' insight as a keynote presenter for the Business & Marketing track will prove to be incredibly valuable and timely," said Frank Sliwka, Vice President of European Business Development and Event Director of GDC Europe.

[Continuing his new 'Tales from the GDC Vault' series, digital historian Jason Scott looks at the evolution of GDC's programs and print advertisements, as well as some of the show's eclectic video reels from the 1990s.]

I suppose I could have entitled this entry "Judging a Book by its Cover," but even I have to draw the line somewhere. Welcome again to another entry of Tales from the GDC Vault, as I bring to you some highlights from GDC history that I am adding to the archives.

I've been capturing tapes like crazy, focusing on the "interesting" stuff, which really means I am essentially judging books by their cover -- I have to go by the tape labels, and if they mention keynotes and premieres, I put those at the top of the to-do list, while tapes that simply list the room number and session time have to wait for another time. Good thing I have some reference material to compare the times and dates to!

Along with the hundreds of video and audio tapes I received in the mail was a three foot stack of documents, mostly made of programs, proceedings and stray advertisements from various GDCs over the last 15 years. I've mostly been using them as reference material, as I type in the descriptions for talks that I'm digitizing. But these documents serve another purpose; they become visual manifestations of what attendees saw in their swag bag when they picked up their badges. Let's check them out.

(By the way, I put scanned images and photographs from GDC Vault work on the Official GDC Flickr account.)

The earliest two covers I have, from 1993 and 1994 respectively, show black and white, almost science-fiction-like drawings, including one of a robot playing chess, which is about as retro as you can get. As pure trivia, and possibly coincidence, the first game software sold for microcomputers was a chess game.

 

Organizers of the Independent Games Festival China, which runs in conjunction with the Game Developers Conference China, have officially announced a call for indie game submissions from the pan-Pacific area now through Thursday, September 1.

Following on its success in past years, GDC China will continue to host the three main elements of IGF China, including the Independent Games Summit, which provides valuable conference sessions specializing in the challenges of independent game development.

These include the Independent Games Festival Pavilion, an onsite exhibition of the very best in local indie games, and the Independent Games Festival Awards, which honors the work of the talented pool of local independent game developers.

The 2011 IGF China Main Competition will give out awards and cash prizes in five categories, including:

- Best Game (RMB20,000 ~ $3,060 USD)
- Mobile Best Game (RMB10, 000 ~ $1,530 USD)
- Excellence In Audio (RMB5,000 ~ $760 USD)
- Excellence In Technology (RMB5,000 ~ $760 USD)
- Excellence In Visual Arts (RMB5,000 ~ $760 USD)

Finalists -- who will receive VIP and expo passes to attend GDC China and the IGF awards ceremony on November 12, 2011 -- will be chosen by a panel of expert jurors including Kevin Li (CEO, TipCat Interactive); Monte Singman (CEO, Radiance Digital Entertainment); Xubo Yang (Director of Digital Art Lab and Assistant Professor; Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Software), and jury chairman Simon Carless, IGF Chairman Emeritus and EVP of the GDC shows and Gamasutra.

The organizers of the fourth Game Developers Conference China (GDC China), to be held in Shanghai this November, are reminding on the May 25th deadline for lecture submissions from Western and Asian developers.

This call for content for the November 12th to 14th event comes as organizers announce the striking new larger venue of the Shanghai Exhibition Center (formerly the Palace Of Sino-Soviet Friendship) in the West Nanjing Road area, in the center of the major Chinese city.

Organizers are looking for submissions in tracks including Global Game Development/Outsourcing, Online Game Development & Business, and the extremely popular Social, Mobile, and Independent Games tracks - with all lectures to be simultaneously translated between English and Chinese during the event.

This year's GDC China will also play host to the third annual Independent Games Festival China, honoring top independent games from all over Asia and Australasia.

The show is the only game developer conference officially endorsed by the Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China.

[Continuing his new 'Tales from the GDC Vault' series, digital historian Jason Scott reveals his first full-length digitized video from the Game Developers Conference archives - John Carmack's fascinating keynote from GDC 2004.]

It took a lot longer and was more involved than I'd expected, but the first of the GDC presentations stored on BetaSP tapes and not available for a lot of years is now online over at GDC Vault's free section: John Carmack's 2004 Game Developers Conference keynote presentation.

For what are no doubt the usual reasons of opportunity, scheduling, and bad luck, this was the very first time he gave a speech at GDC, even if the work he'd done (including Commander Keen, Doom and Quake) had been the topic of discussion and mention for the previous decade.

Describing in deep technical detail the issues I had building the workflow of transfer from Betacam SP tapes to .flv files is probably not the best use of your time, so let me quickly go over the high-level version of it.