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[In her first post for the GDC weblog, Game Developers Conference event director Meggan Scavio welcomes you to this year's event.]
A new GDC season is upon us, the 23rd to be exact and my 10th. What milestones have we crossed over the last 23 years? Quite a few actually.
Let me take you back to 1987, when we were called the Computer Game Developers Conference and we were in a living room with a few names you might recognize: Don Daglow, Tim Brengle, Chris Crawford and Gordon Walton, to name a few. Fast forward through Milpitas, Santa Clara, Long Beach, and San Jose to our current landing spot: San Francisco.

Mark Healey and Alex Evans, co-founders of Media Molecule, will deliver a keynote speech titled, “Media Molecule, Little Team, Big Ideas,” at this year’s Paris Game Developers Conference (Paris GDC). Healey and Evans will address the breadth of ways in which game developers can incorporate creativity into their designs. From god-games and sim-games to full-on modding, they will discuss the past, present, and future of user-generated content as illustrated through the story of Media Molecule’s conception and its first title, LittleBigPlanet for the PlayStation 3.

Paris Game Developers Conference 08 (Paris GDC) has published its roster of featured speakers and sessions. The second French edition of the Game Developers Conference, the premier event for developers and publishers in the videogame industry, is scheduled for June 23-24 at the Coeur Défense Convention Centre in Paris. More than 50 sessions designed for developers looking to expand their expertise, network, and learn from their peers will be presented by industry experts and thought leaders at Paris GDC 08.
Highlighted sessions from the call for papers include:

• The Right Tools for the Write Job, by Mac Walters, Bioware
• Your Music Is the Game: Designing PHASE, the Other Project at Harmonix, by Chris Foster, Harmonix Music Systems
• The Free to Play Revolution, by Howard Marks, Acclaim
• Tackling High Level, Scalable Physics for Next Generation Game Engines, by Adam Moravanszky, NVIDIA

“It’s a very exciting time right now in the game industry, as developers are creating blockbuster hits for both the core market and for those who don’t call themselves gamers,” said Jamil Moledina, Executive Director, Game Developers Conference Events. “This cross-section of the sessions we intend to field in Paris should provide a taste of the range of global breakthroughs that are driving European development today.”
Sessions were selected by the Paris GDC advisory board, composed of international experts of the game industry, as well as the event organizers Think Services and Connection Events.

This year the GDC is setting up ALL the tutorial, lecture, and panel classrooms with super fancy HD projectors. These projectors will provide more detailed and brighter images. We want the visual presentations that speakers deliver at the GDC to be as good as the verbal content they provide. And, as usual, the classrooms in the Audio Track with have Dolby 5.1 surround sound.

Hello everyone! A rare Thursday update from me, largely because we're going to push the schedule live early next week (yes, it's true), and we have a handful of interesting talks that need to go live beforehand. I know a lot of folks out there like these updates to have a theme, and so it strikes me that the common theme on these late arrivals is, well, brains.

Hello everyone! So two very important bits of information are going out today. One is the Wednesday keynote announcement, which I'm not going to talk about here because that actually goes live later this morning. The other is a trio of Nintendo talks going live today, which we're very excited to host at GDC.

Hello everyone, welcome back from the break! I had hoped to get an update out to you last week, but I had to focus on actually developing GDC. In the meantime, I hope you had a chance to check out our Thursday keynote announcement of luminary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who we've challenged to propose the next 20 years of games.