By Simon Carless
 With this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco complete, organizers have been collecting the event's substantial volume of visual documentation.
This volume chronicles many of the speakers who highlighted the main conference tracks during GDC, part of the UBM Techweb Game Network (also this website's parent company), from inspiring creative manifestos to in-depth discipline-specific talks.
These include notables such as Blizzard's Rob Pardo and keynote speaker Sid Meier of Civilization fame, as well as last-minute secret speaker addition Will Wright (The Sims), and many more from the over 450 GDC speakers this year. An earlier roundup collected images from the Independent Games Festival Summit, Pavilion, and Awards.
Game Developers Conference 2010 Sessions
These pictures capture moments from a wide variety of talks, drawn from the considerable official GDC photo archive.
 Firaxis design legend Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates!) headlined this year's conference with his keynote "The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong)."
 ...and fellow design legend Will Wright (The Sims, Spore) closed out the show with his sprawling and fascinating "The Metaphysics of Game Design," initally presented under the pseudonym Phaedrus.
Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Epic Mickey) waxed curmudgeonly about the dangerous of obsessing over progress during this year's incarnation of the annual invitation-only "Lunch With Luminaries" event.
These game developers just can't wait to confer at the Game Developers Conference! Soon, they will get their chance.
How does Blizzard make so much money? It's the game design! Rob Pardo (World of Warcraft, StarCraft II) "explains it all" in a practical development lecture.
"You'll love our new game this much," gestures Peter Molyneux (Fable II, Fable III) in a detailed talk explaining the Fable series genre metamorphosis.
Much like the children, connectivity is our future. A panel of esteemed game developers consisting of, from left to right, Jason Holtman (Valve), Brian Reynolds (Zynga), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Min Kim (Nexon America), and Rob Pardo (Blizzard) discuss what it all means.
Much like connectivity, free games are our future. Kristian Segerstrale, founder of social game developer Playfish (Pet Society, Who Has the Biggest Brain?), argues that the game industry shouldn't fear the concept of "free."
Moscone Center's North Hall is overrun by game developers at the Game Developers Conference!
Noted game designers Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Kim Swift (Airtight Games), Heather Kelley (Kokoromi), and Erin Robinson (Wadjet Eye Games) battle to the death novelty prize with game designs based on "real-world permadeath" during this year's Game Design Challenge. (Spoiler alert: Chen wins.)
Denki's Gary Penn was just one of numerous presenters at this year's Microtalks session, three of whom are highlighted in Gamasutra's coverage of the event.
Veteran game designer Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry series, Train) explains how board games led her to dump electricity and learn to love design.
"We're all doomed," Chris Hecker doesn't actually really claim as he reflects on the potential dangers of gaming's nightmare scenario in his talk "Achievements Considered Harmful?"
"Now that was some mighty fine conferring," these people are probably thinking as they decompress during this year's evening Speaker Party.
[More pictures of the Game Developers Conference as a whole, taken by Vincent Diamante, are available on the Official GDC Flickr stream.]
    
By Simon Carless
Futurestates is a collection of digital shorts from up-and-coming filmmakers sharing a "vision of American society in the not-too-distant future". In this episode, "Play", director David Kaplan and game designer Eric Zimmerman (Gamelab) imagine how we might play -- or try to escape -- video games years from now:
"Play imagines a not-too-distant future where video games have become indistinguishable from reality. These fully immersive games are nested inside each other like Russian dolls — each new game emerging from another and connecting backwards with increasing complexity.
One moment, a player is a Japanese schoolgirl embroiled in a pillow fight with her girlfriends — and the next moment, the player has suddenly morphed into a scandalized state senator defending himself against a throng of angry reporters.
Synthetic experience competes with real experience as dream, fantasy, and memory begin to collapse into each other. Identities become elastic as the players consecutively inhabit completely different genders, ages, and ethnicities."
The film and its games hope to provoke questions from gamers like "Who are the players?", "What is the purpose of these games?", "What is the point of winning?", and "Where is it all leading?". It's an episode that looks to use video games as a metaphor for the human search for meaning and identity.
You can watch more digital shorts from Futurestates: Season 1 here.
[Via fort90]  
By Simon Carless
 Out to prove that her talents extend well beyond cooking and gardening, Mama is taking on arts and crafts with a new game headed to Nintendo DS this fall. Majesco's Crafting Mama will have the minigame matron jumping into 40 different crafts projects as she puts away her wooden spoon and spade for scissors and a bottle of glue.
Mama will help players sew, mold, glue, cut, and paint a wide range of crafts: patchwork quilts, earrings, candles, birdhouses, and even mini-Mama dolls. Players can use their creations within the game, too, dressing up mama in a handmade apron or flying a folded paper airplane. Crafting Mama will also feature multiplayer support to allow gamers to make crafts together.
"Crafting is a natural extension of our most successful franchise," says Majesco CEO Jesse Sutton. "Much like last spring's Gardening Mama, Crafting Mama combines the award-winning Mama formula of addictive stylus-based activities with a popular pastime that has been underserved in videogames. We're looking forward to sharing Mama's newest hobby with her vast and diverse group of fans this holiday season."
[Via Joystiq] 
By the99th
The terms of Apple's developer agreement were leaked in a manner which I'm sure resulted in at least one assasination and the smuggling of at least, by conservative estimates, several dozen Ukranian and Palestinian child slaves - such is the price of evoking the Freedom of Information Act. Such evocation is not to be confused with Evoke, Jane McGonigal's new game funded by the worldbank, which invokes contemplation as to what kind of deal underlies its making.
But I'm not here to talk about 3rd world debt-gouging and attempts at fucking all of us via world government, I'm here to talk about how specific deals fuck specific people. Clearly, I write for this site solely as an exercise in burning away potential career opportunities.
As Greg has discussed, most deals on most platforms will fuck you. And by fuck I mean, savage your most vulnerable inner feelings with overt and forceful assertion of one party's (them) dominance over the other (the developer). But Apple's deal, that takes the proverbial apple cake. You lose the right to sue them, you lose the right to use your IP elsewhere should they deny you the right to sell it, you lose your right to talk about the contract, and presumably - in a super-secret addendum that cannot be leaked lest more lives are lost - you lose the right to have more than one child, putting a premium on sons. I would ask Jason Rohrer since he's signed the thing at one point and has two kids, but I don't want to put his family in danger.
Are there any platforms where the developer doesn't end up getting metaphorically penetrated in order to gain audience penetration? Is this degredation of relations from co-operative, even convivial, to a S&M rape-scene out of the basement gunshop in Pulp Fiction an inevitable process tied directly into the idea of a "platform"?
Meanwhile, Ron Carmel discusses a kinder, lubed up alternative. The thing I like most about his speech, or at least the transcription, is this line:
"When asked how large the funding pool is, Carmel said that amount 'doesn't matter. The bottleneck is how many games can we find that we think can make good use of the investment. If we can find 20 games a year that can make money, then we can raise money for 20 games a year.'"
This exemplifies and inductive mentality toward investment where you want to be extremely selective and find deals where you risk $100k and you stand to gain at least 1 million, 1:10 risk/reward, if the probabilities are higher than 10% than you just fill your portfolio with them and let it be. If you're risking 10 million to make a 1 million in profits, your mentality is quite different, hence the history of retail videogame publishing.
If you're a platform holder then the risk profile is more non-linear, your risk is complicated by the overall health of your platform, it's a volume game, a statistical arbitrage. Two distinct strategies derive from this, either being extremely open to all volume and taking a smaller cut of profits, a seemingly benign strategy taken by WiiWare, or by being extremely selective and ramping up the profit share when the market seems to find a consistent cash-flow, a strategy taken by XBLA. Apple seems to have taken a third strategy, which is to make the platform simultaneously open and selective, while nuetering the developer's legal right to make market decisions should the platform-holder's fiat dictums deem them a great big FAIL.
Update: for what it's worth, here is a speech by Facebook's platform manager and a sharp complementary post by Nabeel Hyatt.
What kind of a deal forbids you from discussing the deal? Nancy Pelosi has the answer.
By Simon Carless
Indie developer Derek Yu finally gave Spelunky fans a preview of his acclaimed roguelike/platformer's upcoming XBLA port with four screenshots from the project. These images show off the game's new high resolution, hand-painted graphics, dynamic lighting, and other visual effects that you won't find in the original PC version.
What you won't see in these screens, though, are all the other additions planned for the port: achievements, leaderboards, new game modes, new audio, new items, new monsters, and more. I presume we'll hear more about those as Spelunky XBLA's release later this year approaches. Jump past the post break for more images! 
[Via @attractmode] 
By costik
One of the banes of the casual game and social game markets is cloning; that is, whenever a successful game appears, developers quickly produce games with essentially identical gameplay patterns. Surprisingly, there is far less of a first-mover advantage for the innovator than you might expect, particularly for small game providers cloned by larger and established companies, who can leverage their existing customer relations to grab share of the new game style.
Cloning, of course, means that a gameplay innovator profits far less than he or she might otherwise by launching an original game; and thus diminution of the value of innovation reinforces all game markets' tendency to become repetitive and boring over time.
The prevalence of cloning in social and casual games is particularly interesting, because cloning was also problem in the 19th century tabletop game market -- but is not a particular problem in the conventional videogame market, the mass-market tabletop market today, the hobby games market, or the mobile games market.
What's the reason for this difference?
It is, ultimately, a consequence of the nature of marketing in the different industries. In the casual game market, publishers and developers spend virtually nothing on marketing and promotion, and simply rely on the firehose of traffic that the portals supply. Similarly, in the social game market, very little is spent on marketing and promotion, with developers relying on the virality of social network user communications to attract players. And also similarly, in the 19th century, advertising and promotion was in its infancy, and publishers relied mostly on establishing as many points of sale as possible and hoping that word of mouth would generate sales.
By contrast, the conventional videogame market spends hugely on marketing and promotion; the mss market game market depends on "old faithful" brands and also spends in the millions promoting newly launched games; mobile games also depends on "old faithful" brands like Tetris, and on games that piggyback on the marketing spend for properties licensed from other media; and the hobby games market depends partly on franchises (the tendency of RPG and TCG players to purchase more product for games they like) and partly on author recognition (boardgamers follow designers whose work they like).
In other words, in markets where cloning does not happen, or rarely happens, it is because an innovator can, through marketing, promotion, and establishing a brand synonymous with a style of gameplay, gain a major first-mover advantage. In markets where cloning does happen, marketing and promotion, and the consequence ability to build brand identity, is weak.
Of course, this "weakness" is also in a sense an advantage; in these markets, game providers' profitability is unquestionably enhanced by the fact that they do not have to spend substantially on marketing and promotion. But the downside is that it is hard to establish brand value, which weakens game providers in negotiations with other members of the value chain, and also makes it harder for them to erect barriers to competition and build sustainable and protectible businesses.
Thus, the reliance of the casual downloadable market on portal distribution has proven to be something of a Faustian bargain; it allowed the market to grow rapidly, but it left the portals in effective control of the market, which they used to squeeze the publishers' and developers' margins, and left publishers and developers with little in the way of a sustainable competitive advantage.
Will social games go the same way? I'll post on that another day.
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