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This week, GDC China has debuted new batch of lectures for the show's Main Conference, featuring Square Enix CTO Julien Merceron on tech development for major publishers, Kabam on blending MMOs and social games, and a notable panel on the future of HTML5.

Taking place November 12-14 at the Shanghai Exhibition Center in Shanghai, China, the event will once again serve as the premier game industry event in China, bringing together influential developers from around the world to share ideas, network, and inspire each other to further the game industry in this region.

This year, the show's Main Conference will feature three primary tracks, covering Online Game Development & Business, Global Game Development, and Social Games.

Here are the latest talks to be revealed for the upcoming show:

- In the Global Development track session, "Designing a Technology Strategy for a Large Publisher," Square Enix (Final Fantasy, Deus Ex) worldwide technology director Julien Merceron will examine the ins and outs of technology development at a large publisher.

Drawing from his experience working at companies such as Ubisoft and Eidos, Merceron will look at the ways in which technology impacts major publishing strategies, and will call attention to the web and mobile trends developers should keep an eye on.

- Elsewhere, in the Social Games track, Kabam's Andrew Sheppard (Dragons Of Atlantis) will host a talk dubbed "Creating MMOs for Social Platforms." Here, he will explain how Kabam strives to combine MMO gameplay with the interaction models found in social games, offering insight into the company's overall strategy for the social market.

With GDC Online just a week away, show organizers have debuted several new lectures in the show's Game Narrative Summit, featuring talks on the 10 commandments of game writing, top industry reporters on innovation in interactive storytelling, tips on writing co-op campaigns, and much more.

Now in its sixth year, the Game Narrative Summit will return to the Austin-based conference with a broad range of sessions on the art of game writing, with lectures from experienced writers, panels with industry professionals, and in-depth interactive workshops for developers of all skill levels.

The Game Narrative Summit will run alongside GDC Online's Main Conference for the first two days of the four-day conference, from Monday, October 11 through Tuesday, October 12 at the Austin Convention Center.

Here are the latest sessions to be announced for the Game Narrative Summit:

- In "The Ten Commandments of Good Video-game Storytelling," Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, and Immaterial co-founder and consultant Rob Auten will go over the key principals for effective game writing, all modeled on the biblical ten commandments.

- Elsewhere, Carbine Studios senior writer Cory Herndon will host "TweetQuest: Telling Stories in 140-Character Chunks," which will outline how Carbine's upcoming MMO WildStar uses art, design, audio, and a 140 character text limit to convey key story details to the player.

- In "Microtalks: 6 Critics' Views on Great Gamewriting," six top games reporters will talk about what they look for in game narratives, and where they anticipate innovation in the future. Speakers include Hit Detection's N'Gai Croal, CBS Interactive's John Davison, Gamasutra's own Leigh Alexander, among others.

- Broken Sword creator and Revolution Software co-founder Charles Cecil will host a session dubbed "Blurring Fact and Fiction: Adventures in Writing Games that Draw on Historical Themes," in which he will examine how writers can draw from historical events to create interesting stories and gameplay opportunities.

GDC 2012 organizers have opened the call for submissions through October 31 for the show's specialized Summits, revealing new Games For Change and Game IT Summits for the March 2012 event.

These Summits will kick-off Game Developers Conference 2012 during the first two days of the conference -- which runs March 5th-9th, 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The Summit events will cover pertinent topics in emerging sectors of the games industry, particularly focusing on broadening the scope of the medium to encompass new audiences, new platforms, and of course new gameplay ideas.

This year, GDC will add two brand new events to the existing lineup for the March 5th-6th Summits: the Games for Change @ GDC Summit and the Game IT Summit.

Games for Change @ GDC is an event hosted in partnership with the Games for Change non-profit organization, which facilitates the creation and distribution of games that exist for humanitarian or educational purposes.

This new GDC event, which complements the annual Games for Change Festival in New York, will allow funders, educators, governmental agencies, and other organizations to interact with indie and commercial game developers to help leverage interactive entertainment for social good.

The latter Game IT Summit is a daylong event, curated by notables such as Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost and Ben Sawyer, that explores how video games can be used to tackle common organizational goals, encouraging discussions about the link between games and the technology-oriented practices used by today's forward-thinking organizations.

"The introduction of the Game IT Summit and the Games for Change @ GDC demonstrates how the Game Developers Conference continues to offer attendees a unique opportunity to participate in diverse conversations that will shape the technology landscape for years to come," said Meggan Scavio, event director.

The Independent Games Festival China has announced the Main Competition and Student finalists for its third annual awards ceremony celebrating the most innovative indie and student games from throughout the Pan-Pacific area.

This year, the finalists offer an extremely broad range of game types and genres, from action brawlers like Pixel May Cry to mobile arcade titles like Super Sheep Tap, with developers hailing from throughout China and its surrounding regions.

Drawing from a prize pool totaling 45,000 RMB (roughly $7,000), IGF China's Main Competition will give away five distinguished awards, covering Excellence in Audio, Technology, and Visual Arts, as well as the Best Mobile Game and Best Game awards. In addition to the prestige and prizes, winners will also receive two All-Access Passes for the upcoming GDC 2012 in San Francisco.

Alongside IGF China's Main Competition, the ceremony will also host the Student Competition, which honors six of the top regional student games, with teams hailing from DigiPen Singapore, the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, and more.

This part of the competition includes two awards -- for Best Student Game and Excellent Student Winners -- and offers roughly 13,000 RMB (roughly $2,000) in cash prizes.

Winners in both competitions 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 at Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Software), Haipeng Yu (producer, Tencent Shanghai), and jury chairman Simon Carless, IGF Chairman Emeritus and EVP of the GDC shows and Gamasutra.

This year's IGF China will take place on November 12, 2011 alongside GDC China, which will be held at the Shanghai Convention Center in Shanghai, China.

Here are the finalists for this year's IGF China:

Main Competition

Billy Makin Kid!, by SLAB Games, Indonesia [Website, Video]

Clay's Reverie, by SuperGlueStudio, China [Video]

FTL (Faster than Light), by Matthew Davis & Justin Ma, China [Website]

One Tap Hero, by Coconut Island Studio, China [Video]

Pixel May Cry, by Feng Li, China [Video]

Pocket Warriors, by WitOne Games, China [Website, Video]

Super Sheep Tap, by aBit Games, China [Website, Video]

The Line HD, by Ant Hive Games, China [Website, Video]

In the latest in a series of interviews with notable speakers from this October's GDC Online, BioWare Austin's Georg Zoeller speaks out on the processes and tools his team uses to generate and tune MMO content in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Originally hailing from Germany, Zoeller moved to Edmonton to join BioWare in 2003, and has since held a number of positions at the company, working on titles such as Neverwinter Nights, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age: Origins. In 2009, Zoeller moved to BioWare Austin to serve as principal designer on The Old Republic.

Here, Zoeller provides an in-depth look at the BioWare's production processes in anticipation of his talk, "Rapid MMO Content Iteration and Validation with Spatial Analysis in Star Wars: The Old Republic," which will outline the various techniques the studio uses to test and validate the game's content.

What would you say are the biggest challenges facing MMO content generation?

Achieving the required -- and expected -- volume of content without compromising quality. MMO players are pretty unforgiving when it comes to quality - you usually get one shot to get it right. Your launch sets the trajectory of where your game is headed and quality of content, even more than quantity is a major contributing factor to success of failure.

Content wise, these games are insanely large undertakings. For example, in Star Wars: The Old Republic, the Planet Alderaan, which is one of 17 planets in the game, holds more creatures than the entirety of Dragon Age: Origins, a game offering 60-80 hours in a single playthrough that took us almost than 5 years to create.

We have thousands of differently voiced characters in the game, all with dialogs and quests that not only need to be written, recorded, staged, scripted and animated, but also tested and validated -- the most engaging quest isn't going to keep a player around if it fails to work.

In order to make the creation and validation of that much content manageable, you not only need more people, you also need to be a lot smarter in your workflows and tools.

GDC Online has debuted several new sessions within the show's Main Conference, featuring Playdom's Raph Koster on the convergence of games and social media, NCsoft West on making City of Heroes free-to-play, and a panel of notable speakers on the future of cloud gaming.

Taking place Monday, October 10 through Thursday, October 13, 2011 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, GDC Online continues as the leading worldwide event dedicated solely to discussing the development and business trends surrounding connected games -- including casual titles, MMOs, virtual worlds, and social networking games.

This year's Main Conference will include tracks on Business & Marketing, Customer Experience, Design, Production, and Programming, as well as a sponsored track on Monetization.

As seen in the event's Schedule Builder, the following lectures are highlights from this year's Main Conference:

- In the Customer Experience track, Playdom's VP of creative design, Raph Koster, will host a lecture dubbed, "It's All Games Now! How Games and Social Media are Converging." Here, Koster will outline the "cross-pollination" between games and online services, explaining what this means for game developers and the future of connected gaming experiences.

- Also in the Customer Experience track, NCsoft's Ross Borden details how the studio turned the subscription-based City of Heroes into a free-to-play game in, "From Spark to Success: How Customer Influence Revolutionized City of Heroes." Along the way, Borden will detail the design and technical challenges involved with introducing a brand new business model to an existing online game.

In the latest in a series of interviews with notable speakers from this October's GDC Online, Eidos Montreal lead writer Mary DeMarle speaks out on the complexities and challenges she faced when working on the critically-acclaimed Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

DeMarle was responsible for the game's storytelling and narrative, and was tasked with crafting a story that could play out in several ways based on a player's actions.

Before joining Eidos Montreal, DeMarle worked on other titles such as Myst III: Exile, Myst IV: Revelation, Homeworld II, Dungeon Siege: Broken Sword, and the a number of titles in the Splinter Cell series.

Here, DeMarle offers a quick look into her writing process in anticipation of her GDC Online talk, "Building the Story-driven Experience of Deus Ex: Human Revolution," which will provide an in-depth look at the robust, branching narrative of the recent cyberpunk shooter.

How did you ensure the game's branching story paths would all coalesce into a cohesive narrative?

Creating a cohesive narrative in a game is never an easy task, especially when you decide to complicate it by enabling player decisions to result in multiple branching paths. The DX:HR production team was able to meet this challenge because of two crucial game design decisions that we made early on.

First, during our conception phase, the core creative team identified "story" as one of the important pillars in a Deus Ex experience. To ensure this pillar received the attention it needed, they then decided to create an in-house narrative design team as an integral part of the game design group. Writers were brought in during conception and present during preproduction to explain the story and cast light on specific story goals for all production departments. They didn't dictate gameplay challenges, artistic or level designs, animations, or scripted events, but they worked with the people who did create these things on a daily basis, to ensure that every aspect of the game presented and/or reflected a cohesive narrative at all times.

The second decision made was to put choice and consequence front and center in the game's design, meaning it had to infuse all aspects of Human Revolution, including its story line. This decision forced us to re-examine our pipelines and ultimately implement some kind of tool that could keep track of branching storylines. Both the tool and the processes we ended up using will be discussed more thoroughly during my GDC Online presentation.

How did you go about writing the game's various story branches? Did you write all the paths first, did you look at player feedback for inspiration, etc?

My approach to writing a game story is to first plot it out conceptually in its entirety, and then break up the story details into varying layers of importance. To do this, I ask myself which details and/or story events are needed to understand the plot in its simplest form, and which details or events can be discovered optionally -- through exploration or via alternate gameplay paths -- to fill out the main plot and make the story richer. Once I know this, I can determine which story-telling vehicle needs to be used to convey each point; be it a forced dialog or cut scene, or a newspaper article or email. I then start writing the story in layers, dealing with all critical path pieces first.