Game Developers Conference - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developer

Video game developer

A video game developer is a software developer that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game console, such as Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including personal computers.Most developers also...

s, focusing on learning, inspiration, and networking. The event comprises an expo, networking events, awards shows such as the Independent Games Festival

Independent Games Festival

The Independent Games Festival is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference, the largest annual gathering of the indie video game industry. It was founded in 1998 to assist and inspire innovation in video game development and to recognize the best independent video game developers...

and the Game Developers Choice Awards

Game Developers Choice Awards

The Game Developers Choice Awards are annually presented by the Game Developers Conference for outstanding game developers and games.Introduced in 2001, the Game Developers Choice Awards were preceded by the Spotlight Awards, which were presented from 1997 to 1999.The 2009 award presentation was...

, and a variety of tutorial

Tutorial

A tutorial is one method of transferring knowledge and may be used as a part of a learning process. More interactive and specific than a book or a lecture; a tutorial seeks to teach by example and supply the information to complete a certain task....

s, lectures, and roundtables

Round table

A round table is a table which has no "head" and no "sides", and therefore no one person sitting at it is given a privileged position and all are treated as equals. The idea stems from the Arthurian legend about the Knights of the Round Table in Camelot....

by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming

Game programmer

A game programmer is a software engineer, programmer, or computer scientist who primarily develops codebase for video games or related software, such as game development tools. Game programming has many specialized disciplines all of which fall under the umbrella term of "game programmer"...

, design

Game design

Game design, a subset of game development, is the process of designing the content and rules of a game in the pre-production stage and design of gameplay, environment, storyline, and characters during production stage. The term is also used to describe both the game design embodied in a game as...

, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.

History

Originally called the Computer Game Developers Conference, the first conference was organized in 1988 by Chris Crawford

Chris Crawford (game designer)

Christopher Crawford is a computer game designer and writer noted for creating a number of important games in the 1980s, founding The Journal of Computer Game Design, and organizing the Computer Game Developers' Conference.- Biography :...

in his San Jose, California

San Jose, California

San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...

-area living room. About twenty-seven designers attended, including Don Daglow

Don Daglow

Don Daglow is an American computer game and video game designer, programmer and producer. He is best known for designing a series of pioneering simulation games and role-playing games, as well as the first computer baseball game and the first graphical MMORPG, all between 1971 and 1995...

, Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel

Brenda Laurel is a pioneering writer, researcher, designer and entrepreneur in the fields of human-computer interaction, interactive narrative and cultural aspects of technology ....

, Brian Moriarty

Brian Moriarty

Brian Moriarty is an American video game developer who authored three of the original Infocom interactive fiction titles, Wishbringer , Trinity and Beyond Zork: The Coconut of Quendor ....

, Gordon Walton

Gordon Walton

Gordon Walton, Jr. is an American video game developer and executive producer who has worked with many North American online game companies, from Maxis to Electronic Arts to Sony Online to Bioware...

, Tim Brengle, Cliff Johnson

Cliff Johnson (game designer)

Cliff Johnson is an American game designer, best known for the early computer puzzle games The Fool's Errand and 3 in Three . Both games were notable for unique visual puzzles and a metapuzzle structure.- Biography :...

, Dave Menconi, and Carol and Ivan Manley. The second conference, held that same year at a Holiday Inn

Holiday Inn

Holiday Inn is a brand of hotels, formally a economy motel chain, forming part of the British InterContinental Hotels Group . It is one of the world's largest hotel chains with 238,440 bedrooms and 1,301 hotels globally. There are currently 5 hotels in the pipeline...

at Milpitas

Milpitas, California

Milpitas is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is a suburb of the major city of San Jose, California. It is located with San Jose to its south and Fremont to its north, at the eastern end of State Route 237 and generally between Interstates 680 and 880 which run roughly north/south...

, attracted about 150 developers. Ernest W. Adams was a director from 1991 to 1995, and during this period conferences moved between facilities in Santa Clara

Santa Clara, California

Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...

, San Jose and Long Beach

Long Beach, California

Long Beach is a city situated in Los Angeles County in Southern California, on the Pacific coast of the United States. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation and the seventh-largest in California. As of 2010, its population was 462,257...

, growing steadily in popularity, and changing from a small, undercapitalized company with previous financial losses into a profitable million-dollar business. Attendance in this period grew from 525 to 2387. By 1994 the CGDC could afford to sponsor the creation of the Computer Game Developers Association with Adams as its founding director. In 2005, the GDC moved to the new Moscone Center West

Moscone Center

Moscone Center is the largest convention and exhibition complex in San Francisco, California. It comprises three main halls: Two underground halls underneath Yerba Buena Gardens, known as Moscone North and Moscone South, and a three-level Moscone West exhibition hall across 4th Street...

, in the heart of San Francisco's

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

SOMA district, and reported over 12,000 attendees. The GDC returned to San Jose in 2006, reporting over 12,500 attendees, and returned to San Francisco in 2007 – where the organizers expect it will stay for the foreseeable future. Attendance figures continued to rise in following years with 18,000 people attending the 2008 event. The 2009 Game Developers Conference was held in San Francisco, on March 23–27, 2009. The IGDA awarded 25 scholarships to send qualified students to attend the 2009 GDC.

Crawford continued to give the conference keynote address for the first several years of the conference, including the famous "whip" speech in the early 1990s where he punctuated a point about game tuning and player involvement by cracking a bullwhip

Bullwhip

A bullwhip is a single-tailed whip, usually made of braided leather, which was originally used as a tool for working with livestock.Bullwhips are pastoral tools, traditionally used to control livestock in open country...

perilously close to the front row of the audience.

Crawford also founded The Journal of Computer Game Design in 1987 in parallel to beginning the GDC, and served as publisher and editor of the academic-style journal through 1996.

The CGDC changed its name to "Game Developers Conference" in 1999. The GDC has also hosted the Spotlight Awards

Spotlight Awards (GDC)

The Spotlight Awards was hosted annually by the Game Developers Conference from 1997 to 1999. Its focus was on the video and computer game industry. GDC now hosts another video game award ceremony call Game Developers Choice Awards since 2001....

from 1997 to 1999, the Independent Games Festival

Independent Games Festival

since 1999 and the Game Developers Choice Awards

Game Developers Choice Awards

since 2001. The GDC is also used for the annual meeting of the International Game Developers Association

International Game Developers Association

International Game Developers Association is the professional society for over 10,000 video and computer game developers worldwide.It is incorporated in the United States as a non-profit organization....

(IGDA).

The Independent Games Festival

Independent Games Festival

is the first and largest competition for independent games, and highlights the innovative achievements of developers ranging in size from individuals building PC titles to studio teams creating console downloadable titles. A pool of judges from the game industry selects the finalists and winners, and the individual creators are named as the recipients of the awards. The IGF is managed and developed by UBM TechWeb, the organizer of the GDC.

The Game Developers Choice Awards

Game Developers Choice Awards

is the game industry's only open, peer-based awards show. Any member of the IGDA may nominate games, and then the membership votes on the finalists. As with the IGF, the individual creators are named as the recipients of the awards. Specialty awards such as Lifetime Achievement and First Penguin are determined by the GDCA committee, and all are revealed at the Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony at the GDC. The IGF and the GDCA are presented back to back, in an awards show produced by UBM TechWeb, typically on the Wednesday of the GDC.

UBM TechWeb has added several other events to the GDC in recent years. At the GDC Expo, developers display the latest techniques useful in game development. "GDC Mobile," first held in 2002, focuses on developing games for mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

s. Starting in 2004, the GDC partnered with Game Connection to present Game Connection @ GDC, a live matchmaking service for developers and publishers, which in 2007 expanded to include Game Connection Services for outsourcing and other services. Starting in 2006, the GDC partnered with Video Games Live

Video Games Live

Video Games Live is a concert series created and produced by industry veterans and video game composers Tommy Tallarico and Jack Wall. The concerts consist of segments of video game music performed by a live orchestra with video footage and synchronized lighting and effects, as well as several...

to feature their symphonic performance of videogame music as the closing night event. In addition, the GDC has hosted a number of conference-wide game experiments designed by GameLab.

The Archives of the 2000-2007 GDC Conference are available from UBM's website Archives page.

UBM TechWeb has also produced several spinoff events. For example, the first GDC Europe (GDCE) was featured at the European Computer Trade Show

European Computer Trade Show

The European Computer Trade Show, commonly known as ECTS, was an annual trade show for the European computer and video game industry, which first ran in 1988, with the last event occurring in 2004....

(ECTS) in London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

between August 31 and September 1, 2001. Other GDC-related events include the Serious Games Summit, first held in 2004 as a GDC tutorial, and spun off as a standalone event in 2005, focusing on developing games

Serious game

A serious game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. The "serious" adjective is generally prepended to refer to products used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, religion,...

for practical purposes, such as education, corporate training, military, and health care applications; and the Hollywood and Games Summit in conjunction with The Hollywood Reporter

The Hollywood Reporter

Formerly a daily trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter re-launched in late 2010 as a unique hybrid publication serving the entertainment industry and a consumer audience...

first held in June 2006. Additional events include the Game Advertising Summit, the Game Outsourcing Summit, the Game Career Seminar, GDC Russia, the China Game Summit, GDC London, the London Games Summit, the London Game Career Fair, and many others. In late 2006, UBM TechWeb acquired The Game Initiative, and now produces the Austin Game Developers Conference.

Game Design Challenge

Eric Zimmerman

Eric Zimmerman is a game designer and the co-founder and CEO of Gamelab, a computer game development company, which is known for the game Diner Dash. Each year Zimmerman hosts the Game Design Challenge at the Game Developers Conference...

came up with the Game Design Challenge. "The idea of the challenge, he said, was to give everyone a sense of the process behind game design, and to attempt to get everyone thinking about new kinds of games." No actual game needs to be built, just designed. The goal of 2nd annual Game Design Challenge was to create a game based on Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

. It was won by Will Wright who designed an Emily Dickinson personality simulator contained entirely on a USB flash drive

USB flash drive

A flash drive is a data storage device that consists of flash memory with an integrated Universal Serial Bus interface. flash drives are typically removable and rewritable, and physically much smaller than a floppy disk. Most weigh less than 30 g...

. The personality would interact with the player by sending Instant Messages

Instant messaging

Instant Messaging is a form of real-time direct text-based chatting communication in push mode between two or more people using personal computers or other devices, along with shared clients. The user's text is conveyed over a network, such as the Internet...

and email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

. The goal was to maintain a stable relationship and avoid the two extremes of romantic obsession with the player or suicidal depression. The first occurrence meant constant interruptions when using the computer. The latter occurrence allowed for the simulation to delete itself. The 3rd time, the task was to create a game worthy of a Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prizes are annual international awards bestowed by Scandinavian committees in recognition of cultural and scientific advances. The will of the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, established the prizes in 1895...

. Harvey Smith won with his PeaceBomb game. It would utilize wireless devices to organize flash mobs to engage in random acts of charity. For the first 3 challenges, Eric Zimmerman has always ended the challenge by indicating that all the contestants ideas could really be made into a game.

The goal of 4th annual Game Design Challenge was to create a game which was a religion

Religion

Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...

, or which could become one. It was won by Jason Rohrer who designed a one-player at a time multiplayer game named Chain World

Chain World

Chain World is a computer game designed by Jason Rohrer, and built on the game Minecraft. Chain World won the 2011 Game Design Challenge. The goal of the challenge was to create a game which could become a religion. The official name of the challenge was GDC: The Game Design Challenge: Bigger Than...

contained entirely on a USB flash drive

USB flash drive

Dates

Conference	Location	Dates
2009
GDC Europe 2009	Cologne, Germany	August 17-19
GDC Austin 2009	Austin, Texas Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...	September 15-28
GDC China 2009	Shanghai, China	October 11-13
2010
GDC 2010	San Francisco, California San Francisco, California San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...	March 9-13
GDC Canada 2010	Vancouver, BC	May 6-7
GDC Europe 2010	Cologne, Germany	August 16-18
GDC Online 2010	Austin, Texas	October 5-8
GDC China 2010	Shanghai, China	December 5-7
2011
GDC 2011	San Francisco, California	February 28 - March 4
GDC Europe 2011	Cologne, Germany	August 15-17
GDC Online 2011	Austin, Texas	October 10-13
Upcoming
GDC China 2011	Shanghai, China	November 14-16
2012
GDC 2012	San Francisco, California	March 5-9
GDC Europe 2012	Cologne, Germany	August 13-15

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.