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Organizers have revealed the finalists for the 11th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the leading peer-based video game industry event celebrating the industry's top games and developers.

Nominations for games released in 2010 are led by indie developer Playdead's Xbox Live Arcade hit Limbo. The evocative monochrome puzzle platformer, which was winner of last year's Independent Game Festival Awards for Visual Art and Technical Excellence, received seven Choice Awards nominations in all, including one for Game of the Year.

The indie stand-out is closely followed by two other Game of the Year nominees, Rockstar San Diego's western-themed open-world adventure game, Red Dead Redemption, with six nominations in total, and BioWare's emotionally-charged science fiction adventure Mass Effect 2, with five nominations.

Treyarch's Call of Duty: Black Ops and Ubisoft Montreal's Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood also received multiple nominations, including one each for Game of the Year.

And, showcasing the diversity of the 'for developers, by developers' awards, other retail and digital games receiving multiple nominations include Double Fine's Costume Quest, SCE Santa Monica's God of War III¸ Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain, Uber Entertainment's Monday Night Combat and Team Meat's Super Meat Boy.

Swedish developer Mojang's Minecraft was also a multiple nominee, receiving three Game Developers Choice nominations, particularly notable because of a concurrent-year first: the game is also a finalist for this year's Independent Games Festival, where it also received three nominations.

GDC 2011 organizers are targeting 'gamification' for a one-day Serious Games Summit segment this March, including a 'passionate debate' on the utility of the subject with Jesse Schell, Jane McGonigal and more.

The second day of the Serious Games Summit, taking place on March 1st during Game Developers Conference 2011 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, will specifically address the emerging trend with both skepticism and insight.

As the advisors explain in the description, the day "will be devoted to the rising trend of 'gamification' - a debatable term and sometimes questionable process of building game-like incentives into non-game applications, to address issues like productivity, health, marketing, and so forth."

The centerpiece of the day will be 'The Great Gamification Debate!', in which some of the leading thinkers in the space, including Schell Games' Jesse Schell, the Institute For The Future's Jane McGonigal, Playmatics' Margaret Wallace, Digitalmill's Ben Sawyer and The Inspiracy's Noah Falstein, debate the contentious subject.

As noted: "[Such] strong opinions exist on both sides of the pro/con
debate that it seems suitable to have an actual honest debate over the
merits, incarnations, and future of gamification", featuring "a who's
who of passionate GDC regulars and gamification developers who've
deployed actual solutions into the field" in an intriguing debate
format.

Game Developers Conference 2011 organizers have sent out their special mail reminder for early registration for this year's GDC in San Francisco, which closes on January 24th, in the form of a special papercraft 'GD-Bot'.

Organizers of the 2011 Game Developers Conference have debuted key new talks including Battlefield 3 tech talks, a fascinating 'failure workshop' and a reveal of the new Thief's generative music system.

As the overall session list for the February/March event further expands, organizers are specially highlighting new Main Conference session announcements released in the last few days.

These talks are part of the Main Conference, which takes place at the Moscone Center from Wednesday March 2nd to Friday March 4th, 2011 during the pre-eminent, San Francisco-based event, featuring discipline-specific Tracks dedicated to programming, design, art, audio, business and management, and production.

Some of the top new lectures added to the GDC roster include the following:

• One high-profile talk is 'The Failure Workshop', featuring rapid-fire presentations from notables including PopCap's George Fan (Plants Vs. Zombies), 2D Boy's Kyle Gabler (World Of Goo), Stardock's Brad Wardell (Galactic Civilizations franchise).

The talks, which also feature Kyle Gray (Henry Hatsworth), Chris Hecker (SpyParty) and Matthew Wegner (Offroad Velociraptor Safari), feature "successful developers on their less-than-successful projects", as "the Failure Workshop focuses on the glorious failures we all have, and the successful games that emerged as a result."

The Independent Games Festival has announced the Main Competition finalists for the thirteenth annual presentation of its prestigious awards, celebrating the brightest and most influential creations to come out of the independent video game development community in the past year.

This year's finalists for the most prestigious indie game awards are led by multiple nominations for standout titles including Frictional Games' psychological horror game Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Mojang's acclaimed 3D worldbuilding sandbox title Minecraft, which received three nominations each.

Other multiple-nominated titles include QCF Design's short playtime 'dungeon crawl' adventure Desktop Dungeons, Messhof's two-player retro fencing game Nidhogg, which received 3 nominations including a Nuovo Award nod, and Supergiant Games' lush isometric adventure title Bastion.

In addition, with the Best Mobile Game award integrated into the IGF Main Competition, there was stiff competition across all categories from games on platforms including iPhone, Android, iPad and beyond, with Best Mobile Game finalists including Ratloop's unique 'line of sight' puzzler Helsing's Fire and former IGF Grand Prize winner Erik Svedang's 'minimalistic dueling game' for iPad, Shot Shot Shoot, as well as Mikengreg's popular App Store title Solipskier.

All of the finalists announced today will be playable on the Expo show floor at the historic 25th Game Developers Conference,
to be held in San Francisco starting February 28th, 2011. In addition,
nearly $50,000 of prizes in various categories, including the $20,000
Seumas McNally Grand Prize will be awarded to these games at the
Independent Games Festival Awards on the evening of March 2nd.

The almost 400 Main Competition entries
represents almost 30 percent more games than last year's record 306
titles, itself a 35 percent rise over the previous year. This emphasizes
the continued popularity and importance of the IGF, which has helped to
highlight and popularize the major independent games of the last
decade, from Darwinia and Braid through World Of Goo to Limbo and beyond.

The full list of finalists for the 2011 Independent Games Festival,
with jury-picked 'honorable mentions' to those top-quality games that
didn't quite make it to finalist status, are as follows:

[Continuing his 'GDC 25' archival research ahead of the 25th Game Developers Conference in San Francisco next February, official GDC historian Jason Scott puts his first digitized video online -- a showreel of the first-ever Independent Games Festival finalists.]

As part of my contract as GDC's archivist and historian, I am tasked with digitizing audio and video from GDC's multi-faceted and multi-decade past. Audio has been getting all my attention, as it's pretty simple to do, and so dozens of talks will show up in the Vault. But video was always going to be the most difficult part... I just knew it would be, and I wasn't wrong.

First, the video is primarily on VHS tapes. Remember VHS tapes? They're nowhere near as popular anymore, and especially not for the kind of thing you connect to a computer and have it "just work".

There's also issues with getting the right video framing, the best method of recording, and also the whole "turning it into a digitized file" thing. It was, in other words, an excellent way to spend an entire Sunday.

(For the techs at home, I am using a LG DVD/VHS Combo I got at Best Buy (Model #RC897T) going through a Hauppauge! USB-Live2 video ingesting connection, to a Hauppauge! program called WinTV which has 4:2:2 sampling, into TS streams. Then I deinterlace and render out in Sony Vegas.)

So if I'm going to go through all this effort, the first video should probably be something reasonably fascinating, and so here's a screengrab of what I dug up (click to access it on GDC Vault):

The Independent Games Festival (IGF), the prestigious GDC-held video game industry event highlighting and awarding the talents of independent game developers, has announced the finalists for the 2011 Nuovo Award, which honors "abstract, short-form, and unconventional game development."

Some of this year's finalists include unconventional party game Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now (B.U.T.T.O.N.), first-person dinner simulation title Dinner Date, Messhof's chunky 2-player fencing title Nidhogg, and zen-like tree simulation title Bohm.

The Nuovo Award, the top video game art prize, is announcing an increase to $5,000 for this year's award winner, thanks to the quality of this year's entries. The winner of the award will be revealed at the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 2, 2011 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, during Game Developers Conference 2011. In addition, all Nuovo finalists will be playable in a special section of the IGF Pavilion on the GDC show floor from March 2nd to 4th.

Now in its third year, the Nuovo Award allows more esoteric art games from among the almost 400 IGF entries to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles, and has been newly expanded this year to include eight finalists.

The full list of this year's Nuovo Award finalists, with links to screenshots and videos of the titles on their official IGF.com entry pages, is as follows:

- Bohm, created by Monobanda - ("Gives you control over the life of a tree. It's a game based on slow gameplay and the act of creation.")

- A House in California, created by Cardboard Computer - ("A surreal, narrative game about four characters who bring a house to life... with environments and activities drawn from a combination of memory, research, poetry, and fantasy.")

- Nidhogg, created by Messhof - ("A 2 player fencing game with football & platforming elements".)

- Dinner Date, created by Stout Games - ("You play as the subconsciousness of Julian Luxemburg, waiting for his date to arrive. You listen in on his thoughts while tapping the table, looking at the clock and eventually reluctantly starting to eat...")

- Loop Raccord, created by Nicolai Troshinsky - ("Manipulate a series of video clips in order to create... continuous movement.")

- The Cat and the Coup, created by Peter Brinson and Kurosh ValaNejad - ("A documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran.")

- Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now (B.U.T.T.O.N.), created by Copenhagen Game Collective - ("A one-button party game for 2-8 players. ... rather than let the computer carry out all the rules, the players are themselves responsible for enforcing (or not enforcing) the rules.")

- Hazard: The Journey Of Life, created by Demruth - ("A philosophical first person single player environmental puzzle game. The game presents no goals directly to the player, but they create goals for themselves based on what they know of the world.")