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This week, organizers of the 2012 Game Developers Conference continue their regular series of updates by announcing new sessions for the show's Social & Online Games Summit, with talks covering Playdom's popular Gardens of Time, the Flash MMO Realm of the Mad God, and Google's latest in Open Web tech.

These talks join a number of other notable sessions for the Social & Online Games Summit, all of which will offer unique and in-depth insight into the ever-changing realms of Facebook gaming, browser development, traditional MMOs, casual games, and beyond.

All eight of GDC 2012's specialized Summits will take place during the first two days of the show -- from Monday, March 5 through Tuesday, March 6 a the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Those interested in checking out the content in these Summits can do so by registering for an All-Access or Summits & Tutorials Pass on the official GDC website (a specialized Independent Games Summit Pass is also available).

The following is a selection of the latest talks to be added to GDC 2012's Social & Online Games Summit:

- Playdom's extremely successful Gardens of Time helped pioneer the hidden object genre on Facebook, and in "Gardens of Time: Design Problem Solving," creative director Eric Todd will examine how this influential game took shape. Throughout the session, Todd will look back on the game's conception and development, detailing the problem-solving lessons he gleaned from designing, launching, and operating Facebook's first major hidden object game.

- Elsewhere, Spry Fox CEO David Edery will outline how the Flash-based MMO Realm of the Mad God (developed in partnership with Wild Shadow Studios) found surprising success despite breaking some well-established tenets of online game design. The talk, "Realm of the Counter-Intuitive God," will look at the game's numerous eccentricities, from its bullet-hell combat to its strict permadeath mechanic, to examine what worked, what didn't, and how these choices affected the game's bottom line.

- Finally, Google software engineer Vincent Scheib will host "The Bleeding Edge of Open Web Tech," picking apart the latest developments in the world of browser-based games. During his presentation, Scheib will focus primarily on client side web technologies, including Web Sockets, WebGL, Mouse Lock, Web Audio API, and more.

As part of a continuing series of updates, organizers of the 2012 Game Developers Conference have debuted new details about over 170 companies now exhibiting during the March show's Expo Floor, Career Pavilion, and the brand-new GDC Play showcase.

These three major sections will receive their own standalone exhibit areas at the San Francisco based show, and will offer attendees a chance to check out exciting new tools and products, network with the industry's top professionals -- and even discover the latest games from some of the industry's up and coming developers.

This year, the GDC Expo Floor (floor plan, see Page 2) -- open from Wednesday, March 7th to Friday, March 9th -- will once again host expansive booths from major companies such as Nintendo, Sony, Intel, Google, Nvidia, Gaikai, Crytek, Unity, and many more.

Elsewhere in the main Moscone North hall, the still being added-to GDC Expo will feature companies such as Tapjoy, Adult Swim Games, 6Waves, Sony Ericsson, BigPoint and PayPal, as well as schools such as DigiPen and the Academy of Art, all of which represent other essential facets of the games industry.

The ever-popular Independent Games Festival Pavilion will once again be a major element of the GDC Expo floor, showcasing all of the professional and student finalists for the 14th annual Independent Games Festival.

In addition, a number of specialized Government Pavilions will pepper the hall, providing spaces to show off the latest and greatest tool companies and game makers from a given area. Countries and regions hosting Pavilions this year include Germany, Korea, Nova Scotia, Belgium, Georgia, Scotland, and many more.

Elsewhere, in its own dedicated hall in Moscone West, the GDC Career Pavilion (floor plan, see Page 1) will give aspiring and professional developers a venue to talk and network with some of the most influential companies from throughout the industry. Major firms already confirmed include AAA companies including Insomniac, WB Games, Blizzard, Sony, Ubisoft, and Activision, as well as top online game companies such as Crowdstar, Riot, Nexon, Tencent, and more.

With the 2012 Game Developers Conference quickly gaining momentum, the show's organizers have chosen to showcase the show's newest and most notable Summit talks, including a behind the scenes look at Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a PopCap lecture on fostering online communities, and Zynga and ArenaNet on online game AI.

These talks join an already robust lineup for the show's eight specialized Summits, which cover emerging or otherwise influential aspects of the game industry, ranging from AI, Social & Online Games, to Independent Games and beyond.

The Summits will take place during the first two days of GDC 2012 -- from Monday, March 5 through Tuesday, March 6 a the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Those interested in checking out all of their content can do so by registering for an All-Access or Summits and Tutorials Pass on the official GDC website (a specialized Independent Games Summit Pass is also available).

The following is a selection of the latest notable sessions to be added to the GDC 2012 Summits:

- In the Independent Games Summit, Capy co-founder and president Nathan Vella will take a moment to look back at one of 2011's most unusual, yet captivating mobile games: Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. His talk, "Perhaps a Time of Miracles Was at Hand: The Business & Development of #Sworcery," will dive into creative and business-focused risks that helped the game find both critical and financial success.

- Over in the Social & Online Games Summit, PopCap's customer engagement lead, Stephanie Bayer, will host a talk dubbed "Community Commodity." This session will explain that while it's relatively easy to attract players to a new online game, developers need to be very careful with how they treat the players they have. Bayer will outline how PopCap creates a thriving social ecosystem for its games on all platforms, encouraging even casual players to stick with these titles long-term.

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries have announced their Main Competition finalists for the 14^th annual presentation of its awards, celebrating the brightest creatives and the most influential game designs to come out of the independent community in the past year.
This year's finalists for the most prestigious indie game awards, each picked by a discipline-specific set of expert juries after recommendations from almost 200 top independent game experts, are led by multiple nominations for several standout titles.
These include thechineseroom's experimental first person game Dear Esther -- picking up nominations for Visual Art and Audio, as well as the Nuovo Award and Seumas McNally Grand Prize -- and Mossmouth's procedurally generated platformer Spelunky, which was nominated for the Design and Technical Awards on top of a nod for the Grand Prize.
Other multiple-nominated titles include Polytron's highly anticipated puzzle adventure Fez, Mode 7's turn based tactical shooter Frozen Synapse, and Die Gute Fabrik's digitally-enabled folk game Johann Sebastian Joust, all of which saw nominations for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize on top of nominations for Technical Excellence, Excellence in Design, and the Nuovo Award, respectively.
The Nuovo Award, once again honoring 'abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development' of all kinds, also saw some standout games in addition to some of the above titles among its eight nominees for the $5,000 prize. These include Bennett Foddy's fiendish climbing game GIRP, Daniel Benmergui's evocative title Storyteller, and Terry Cavanagh's two-player puzzle title At A Distance.
Now in its second year fully integrated into the IGF Main Competition, the Best Mobile Game Award saw nominations for Tiger Style's sci-fi action gardening game Waking Mars -- also up for an Excellence in Audio award -- Simogo's rhythm-stealth game Beat Sneak Bandit, Steph Thirion's constellation-crafter Faraway, Powerhead's color-puzzler ASYNC Corp, and Vlambeer's fishing/shooter Ridiculous Fishing.
All finalist games will be playable at the IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2012 Expo floor from March 7-9, 2012, at San Francisco's Moscone Center, as part of a week of independent game-related content that also includes the Independent Games Summit (March 5th-6^th), and the IGF Awards ceremony itself.
The IGF Awards, where this year's IGF winners will be unveiled, will be held on the evening of March 7, alongside the Game Developers Choice Awards. IGF award recipients will receive $60,000 of prizes in various categories, including the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
The full list of finalists for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, with jury-picked "honorable mentions" to those top-quality games that didn't quite make it to finalist status, is as follows:

Organizers of the 2012 Game Developers Conference have debuted a trio of new talks in the show's Artificial Intelligence Summit, spanning games from Thief 4 through Double Fine's Happy Action Theater to Hitman: Absolution and beyond.

The talks are part of a new set of AI Summit announcements featuring a look at some esoteric AI techniques, some examples of animation-driven locomotion, and how developers are making virtual characters more socially engaging.

The GDC Summits will take place Monday, March 5 through Tuesday, March 6, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and will offer specialized looks into emerging or otherwise influential sectors of the games industry.

This year, GDC will feature a total of eight Summits, with topics including AI, Localization, Education, Independent Games, Smartphone & Tablet Games, and Social & Online Games -- new to the show this year are the Game IT Summit and Games for Change @ GDC.

The latest sessions to be added to the event's AI Summit, held on the Monday and Tuesday of the show, include the following:

- More often than not, we think of AI as a series of tools that help virtual characters take action. In "Off the Beaten Path: Non-Traditional Uses of AI," however, developers will explain how they leverage AI in some unusual, yet beneficial ways.

During this session, Michael Robbins of Gas Powered Games will explain how he used neural networks to drive tactical decision making in Supreme Commander 2, Double Fine's Chris Jurney will detail some vision-based tricks for the studio's Kinect-based Happy Action Theater (pictured), and Havok's Ben Sunshine-Hill will outline how AI can help adjust level of detail to best suit a player's needs.

- With games becoming more and more visually detailed, even the simplest animations need to become more nuanced and complex. "Animation Driven Locomotion for Smoother Navigation" will help address this issue by detailing how developers can use animation as a tool for more realistic pathfinding.

Using examples from games like Hitman: Absolution, Thief 4, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, IO Interactive's Bobby Anguelov, Eidos Montreal's Gabriel Leblanc, and Big Huge Games' Shawn Harris will show off methods for using animation to improve the way game characters navigate virtual space.

This week, Game Developers Conference 2012 has announced three new Main Conference talks, featuring a panel on the indie renaissance, a look at emerging technology trends, and a breakdown of the tech pipeline for Assassin's Creed.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest highlights for GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- The Business, Marketing & Management track is revealing a signature panel, "Back to the Garage: The Return of Indie Development," featuring industry notables including Epic founder Tim Sweeney, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman, Mojang's Markus "Notch" Persson, with moderator, UCSC's associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media, Jane Pinckard.

Drawing from their varied and prolific careers in the game industry, these panelists will examine the explosive growth of small-scale and indie game development. Each of them will use their prodigious experience to discuss key indie opportunities and risks, "while offering advice on how to make the most of digital distribution, new platforms, and much more."

- Elsewhere, in a key talk in the show's Programming track, Square Enix's global CTO Julien Merceron will host "Designing a Technology Strategy for a Large Publisher." Merceron, drawing from his experience working at Ubisoft, Eidos, and now Square Enix, will explain how developers need to tailor their technology to support the varying needs, strengths, and weaknesses of major publishers.

Merceron, who oversees technology across the entire merged entity of Square Enix and Eidos, including franchises from Final Fantasy through Tomb Raider and Deus Ex, will outline how a company's technology alters its approach to internal development, and will point to emerging trends developers should be aware of.

This week, GDC 2012 has revealed three notable Main Conference sessions, featuring Valve on dynamic dialog systems, Double Fine on kid-friendly design, and Rocksteady on the soundtrack for Batman: Arkham City.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest highlights for GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- In the Programming track, Valve's Elan Ruskin will break down the process the studio uses to create dynamic and responsive dialog systems in games like Left 4 Dead. The talk, dubbed, "AI-driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching. Empower Your Writers!", will delve into the mechanisms used to track thousands of possible scenarios and ensure that in-game characters always react appropriately.

Ruskin will also detail how this system allows writers to easily edit and add new lines of dialog without putting a heavy burden on the studio's programmers.

- Over in the Design track, Double Fine project lead Nathan Martz will host "Fun for Everyone: Lessons in Accessible Design from Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster." Looking back on the studio's recent Kinect-based children's game, Martz will explore how to best introduce mechanics and teach players about a game, even if it's the first one they've ever played.

- Finally, the Audio track will feature a Rocksteady-led lecture on composing the score for the studio's highly-acclaimed Batman sequel. In the talk, "Composition Process in Batman: Arkham City," audio director and composer Nick Arundel will offer some tips for composing a score that remains cohesive and fresh, even over the course of a 20 hour game. In addition, Arundel will look beyond Arkham City to examine whether formal musical development has a place within the game industry at large.

In addition to the above sessions, GDC organizers recently added new Main Conference talks covering the visual effects in Gears of War 3, a breakdown of our psychological need to play, and Ninja Theory's approach to motion capture. Show organizers have also announced new Summit talks featuring a look at the localization of StarCraft II, a talk from Triple Town creator Daniel Cook, and a series of mini AI lectures.