GDC 2006 Features - no reg. required
GDC Mobile: The Future of Mobile Gaming and its Enemies [03.31.06] Last week at GDC Mobile, EA Mobile Senior VP Mitch Lasky delivered his take on the future of mobile gaming including what is needed for the industry's continued success and what obstacles stand in the way of this growing market.

GDC: Is That a Franchise in Your Pocket? An Animal Crossing: Wild World Case Study [03.31.06] At last week's GDC, Nintendo producer Katsuya Eguchi gave this talk on making Animal Crossing Wild World for the Nintendo DS and the design considerations involved in taking a home console game and redesigning it for a handheld console.

GDC: Experimental Gameplay Workshop 2006 [03.30.06] As in past years, last Wednesday's Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC played to a packed house. Beyond standing-room only, the lecture hall was crowded enough to concern and irritate the local fire marshal as presenters unveiled the latest batch of experimental gameplay goodies.

GDC: Top 10 Video Game Research Findings [03.30.06] On the final day of the 2006 Game Developers Conference, three academics presented the top ten video game- related research projects from 2004 and 2005 whose sometimes surprising and intriguing findings could impact the way game creators think about and make games.

Post-GDC: Physical Gameplay in Half-Life 2 [03.29.06] Half-Life 2 Senior Software Engineer Jay Stelly led this GDC session last Thursday on the physical gameplay design in Half-Life 2, which examined Valve's approach to game mechanics design, and how physical interaction methods were devised for 2004's blockbuster.

Post-GDC: Spore: Pre-Production Through Prototyping [03.29.06] Maxis Senior Development Director Eric Todd gave this GDC lecture last week on the value of prototyping and creating experimental models before dedicating one's self to any one approach to a software problem.

A Meeting Of Minds: BioWare & Pandemic's Story So Far [03.29.06] In this fascinating interview, the heads of 'superdeveloper' conglomerate Pandemic and BioWare discuss the status of the companies, post-merger, and also talk in detail about subjects as wide-ranging as the Nintendo Revolution and BioWare's new Austin MMO studio.

Post-GDC: Defining The Assassin [03.28.06] One of the most fascinating lectures from last week's GDC was Ubisoft Montreal's look at the design philosophies behind Project Assassin, its intended to be revolutionary next-gen action title, and Gamasutra has a full write-up from the unmissable session.

GDC: The Localization of Counter-Strike in Japan [03.27.06] Continuing our coverage from last week's GDC is this session featuring Namco project manager Kouichirou Taninami, as he relates his experience and research into localizing Counter-Strike to better appeal to a Japanese audience.

GDC: God of War: How the Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another [03.27.06] Continuing Gamasutra's detailed post-GDC coverage, SCEA's Tim Moss, lead programmer on both God Of War and its sequel, gave a vital talk on the last day of the conference on finding the balance between the needs of programmers and those of the designers.

GDC: Creating a Global MMO: Balancing Cultures and Platforms in Final Fantasy XI [03.24.06] PlayOnline organizer and producer Sage Sundi took the microphone at GDC to examine what makes Final Fantasy XI unique and successful as an MMOG as he went on to detail how the game is supported to ensure a uniform experience across all platforms and all territories.

GDC: IGDA: Murder, Sex, and Censorship: Debating the Morals of Creative Freedom [03.24.06] California Assemblymember Leland Yee joined Dr. James Paul Gee (University of Wisconsin at Madison) and Jason Della Rocca of the IGDA on this IGDA panel at GDC concerning violence and "the Morals of Creative Freedom" in video games.

GDC: What's Next in Content Keynote - Will Wright says, 'Greetings Earthings!' [03.24.06] In this year's highly anticipated game design keynote, The Sims creator and designer extraordinaire Will Wright offered insight into the research process followed in creating Maxis' upcoming title Spore, where he hopped from subjects from astrobiology, Drake's equation on the probability of life in outer space and the Russian space program to Maxis' recruiting policies and the design of coal-mining cranes.

GDC: The Game Design Challenge: The Nobel Peace Prize [03.24.06] The third annual Game Design Challenge at the GDC featured Midway's Harvey Smith, Epic Games' Cliff Bleszinski, and Keita Takahashi of Namco with their take on games that involves the Nobel Peace Prize in some way.

GDC: All About Ninety-Nine Nights: Next-Gen Character Design [03.24.06] Q Entertainment's Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Phantagram's SangYoun Lee discuss their joint development of Ninety-Nine Nights for the Xbox 360, focusing particularly on character design and the magic of perspective change.

GDC Keynote: Building a Better Battlestar [03.23.06] Entitled "Building a Better Battlestar" this keynote featured Battlestar Galactica creator and producer Ronald D. Moore sharing his thoughts and experiences on updating and re-imagining a well-known IP with great success.

GDC: Designing Tabula Rasa: Lessons From the World of MMOs [03.23.06] In attempting to create the "dream" MMO, Richard Garriott and NCsoft suffered a false start before deciding to start all over. In this session Richard Garriott chronicles the beginning, starting over, and the lessons learned.

GDC: Rules Worth Breaking [03.23.06] Thursday at GDC 2006, Hal Barwood and Noah Falstein (of Finite Arts and The Inspiracy, respectively) presented a talk called “Rules Worth Breaking,” an overview of some rules they've collected that as part of the 400 Project that, as Barwood says, “are so good, they're worth breaking.”

GDC: Bang! Howdy: Nuggets and Rustlin’ Tips [03.23.06] Wearing a ten-gallon hat and freely pouring whiskey, Three Rings CEO Daniel James had originally planned a postmortem examining the wild success of Bang! Howdy. Seeing as how the game hadn't yet shipped, he shifted instead to examining how Puzzle Pirates informed the creation of the soon-to-public-beta Bang!

GDC: Successful Outsourcing on AAA Games [03.23.06] The next generation of video games requires more assets and man-power than ever. Using Forza Motorsport as an example this session showed how companies looking to bolster their production capability through outsourcing could, given the right approach, meet AAA quality while using external outsourcing to meet tight deadlines.

GDC: "What's Next?" Panel [03.23.06] Covering the GDC 2006 theme of "What's Next?" this panel of industry luminaries gathered to discuss "what's next" for the game industry, including the next hardware generation, new and changing attitudes about game design, and serious concerns about the stability and structure of the game industry as it is now.

GDC: The Birth And Growth Of Independent Game Studios [03.23.06] Spanning two sessions, this feature from GDC takes a look at the business of starting and growing a sucessful game development house drawing on the experience of Online Alchemy's Michael Sellers and Vicarious Visions' Guha and Karthik Bala.

GDC: Success Factors of One-Button Casual Mobile Games [03.22.06] Kyu C. Lee, president of Gamevil, delivered this talk, discussing the success of their own one-button games, and hinting at how developers could use this model to their own advantage. He was a bit nervous, and overly humble, but the message still came across – one-button games are big business.

GDC: Casual Games Summit 2006: An Existential Panel [03.22.06] The second half of the Casual Games Summit at this year's Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, covered a variety of topics ranging from who holds the power, to game cloning, to the "soccer mom" demographic.

GDC: Backwards is Forward: Making Better Games with Test-Driven Development [03.22.06] High Moon Studio developers Noel Llopis and Sean Houghton introduce a unique build method called test-driven development (TDD) in this intermediate level lecture at GDC 2006. In it they discuss what TDD is, how others can use it in their development cycle, and the benefits of testing often - a primary focus of the methodology.

GDC: Casual Games Summit 2006: An Introduction to Casual Games [03.22.06] This full-day tutorial at the Casual Games Summit at this year's GDC featured an over-arcing "übertheme", broken down into digestible segments. That theme, roughly hewn, being a comparison of casual games now to where the industry was three years ago revealing how much casual games have grown since.

GDC: Serious Games Summit: Behind the Game: ‘What's Wrong With Serious Games?' [03.22.06] Framed as an open, frank conversation, key advocates of the serious games initiative met to discuss the problems surrounding the serious games field. Problems discussed included funding, a lack of advocacy, and the ambiguity over what even constitutes a serious game.

GDC: Ageia's PhysX Launch [03.22.06] This year's GDC sees physics on the mind of many attending programmers and developers. Among the many software tools made available in the last few years, Ageia looks to hit the ground running with the launch of their hardware-based solution - the PhysX PPU.

GDC Tutorial: Emotion Boot Camp: Putting More Emotion Into Play [03.21.06] This GDC tutorial featured XEODesign's Nicole Lazzaro and Katherine Isbister PhD of the Rensselaer Games Research Laboratory dissecting the process of creating emotion in games and how to exert authorial control over player choices.

GDC: Serious Games Summit Keynote: 'A New Kind Of Game' [03.21.06] Kicking off the second day of the Serious Games Summit at GDC with his keynote, 'A New Kind Of Game: Broadening The Idea Of What Games Can Be', game theorist Jesper Juul presented an interesting lecture on how games have evolved over the past 30 years.

Pre-GDC: amBX - Rumble in the Sofa [03.20.06] In a more environmental approach to video game immersion, Iain Simons visited Philips' UK research labs to take a look at the company's amBX initiative, which aims to use light, color, sound, heat and air to submerge the gamer within a complete "sensory surround experience".

Road To The IGF: ViquaSoft (Tommy and the Magical Words) [03.20.06] The latest in Gamasutra's "Road to the IGF" series of interviews with the 2006 Independent Games Festival finalists speaks with ViquaSoft, developer of Tommy and the Magical Words, a finalist for the Innovation in Visual Art award.

GDC: Dashing for Independence: Gamelab CEO Eric Zimmerman on the Importance of Self-Publishing [03.20.06] In this exclusive interview, Diner Dash developer Gamelab's CEO Eric Zimmerman discusses the company's move to independent self-publishing, and why such a business model may be necessary to sustain the industry's future.

GDC: Nokia Keynote: The Next Generation of Mobile Gaming [03.20.06] At today's GDC Mobile event in San Jose, Nokia outlined the future of its platform in its keynote, 'The Next Generation of Mobile Gaming', including significant discussions of plans for Nokia's gaming future.

Serious Games Summit Keynote: You Can (Not) Be Serious [03.20.06] One of the very first sessions kicking off the 2006 Game Developers Conference was a keynote for the Serious Games Summit which featured Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale, in a talk named 'You Can (Not) Be Serious' as he offered some fascinating opinions, both on the future of virtual worlds and the way in which his own company's efforts are helping to stretch boundaries.

GDC 2006 Live Coverage [03.27.06] Gamasutra's live coverage from GDC 2006 is now finished, but a full archive of features and breaking news is now available from the conference, and further exclusive session write-ups and interviews will debut this week.

Welcome To Serious Games Source! [03.30.06] We're pleased to announce the Beta version of SeriousGamesSource.com, a website specifically for the 'serious games' market (games created for training, health, government, military, educational and other uses), expanding from the already successful Gamasutra newsletter devoted to the issue.