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If you make games with an online component, sooner or later you're going to have to tackle the problem of toxic player behavior. It's never easy, but GDC 2015 officials are lining up some expert talks for the March conference that should help you meet the challenge.
Riot Games' Dr. Jeffrey Lin is one such expert, and during his GDC 2015 talk "More Science Behind Shaping Player Behavior in Online Games," Lin will share three years of methods, stories and lessons in his pursuit of improving player behavior in online games.
Dr. Lin serves as the lead designer of social systems at Riot, and if you make time to attend his talk he'll guide you through some basic psychology and social dynamics to teach you how to apply science to game design and (hopefully) design better multiplayer experiences for your players.

The field of free-to-play game design is here to stay, and GDC officials will once again host a series of frank talks on the topic from leading experts as part of the F2P Summit -- one of eight that will take place Monday, March 2nd and Tuesday, March 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco during the first two days of GDC 2015.
Contemporary developers grapple with the creative implications of a world in which gameplay and monetization are intimately intertwined. Seasoned F2P game design consultant Ethan Levy believes the key to ethical monetization lies in how you first approach your game's design, and he'll be running down some concrete methods for doing so in his GDC 2015 F2P Summit talk "New Approaches to F2P Game Design."
Check it out if you're curious to learn practical methods for designing free-to-play mechanics from the start of a project, a method for designing better first-time player experiences and a model for categorizing player types in order to make a monetization system that puts your players' needs first.

The stylized post-apocalyptic punk rock art direction of Insomniac's Sunset Overdrive is one of the game's biggest draws, and studio art director Jacinda Chew is coming to GDC 2015 in March to reveal how it came to be.
Chew's talk, Order from Chaos: The Art Direction of Sunset Overdrive", is meant to show how the visual design of Sunset Overdrive was developed to meet the needs of the game's technology, tone and gameplay, rather than pure aesthetics.
Check it out to see a breakdown of the problems Insomniac faced during pre-production (including big headaches like the "attitude" coming off as derivative or dissonant) and how the studio went about solving them.
Chew is aiming her talk at artists, designers and creative types looking for advice on developing a unique art direction that complements their game's design.

The notion of operating "games as a service" is gaining traction in the industry, but the nitty-gritty details of pulling it off from a mobile game maker's perspective can often seem frustratingly vague.
If you're attending the 2015 Game Developers Conference in March, you probably already know how to make a great game. But how do you develop and deliver weekly content to your players, and how do you then take the analytics data your players give you and use it effectively to iterate on your core design? What if you're a small studio, or an indie team working out of your apartments?

Designing a satisfying simulation game is hard. Working within the constraints of contemporary mobile devices makes it even harder, but Storm8 game design chief Dan Scheidegger led his team of developers to do just that with the Restaurant Story franchise and now he's coming to GDC 2015 in March to explain how they pulled it off.
During his talk, "Perfecting the Recipe for Mobile Success: Restaurant Story 2 Postmortem," Scheidegger will walk you through the development and launch of Storm8's remarkably successful 3D mobile restaurateur sim.

It's far too easy to let practical studio management concerns like hiring great talent take a backseat to the practical day-to-day demands of game development.
Born of necessity, confined to HR personnel and often executed in a less than elegant fashion, your hiring strategy can actually reflect the character of your studio as much as your games do.
Thatgamecompany (Flower, Journey) studio manager Sunni Pavlovic has a truckload of experience optimizing hiring strategies to find and retain top game development talent to build efficient, comfortable teams, and she's coming to GDC 2015 next March to explain how she does it -- and how you can do it too.

Well-known parenting educator and author Rosalind Wiseman is teaming up with game industry personality Ashly Burch to tackle a challenging topic at GDC 2015: How do young people feel about modern video games?
More specifically, how do young women feel about them, and how might that affect the next generation of game development? You can find out by attending GDC in San Francisco next March and sitting in on Burch and Wiseman's "Curiosity, Courage, and Camouflage: Revealing the Gaming Habits of Teen Girls" presentation.