GDC Diary: Day One

The Reality of Game Design

The highly-anticipated 2005 Game Developers’ Conference kicked off last Monday, March 8th with great success. Held in San Francisco’s spacious Moscone Center West, the facilities are a far cry from the almost quaint building in San Jose, where the conference is traditionally held. And a change in locale wasn’t the only thing differentiating this year’s conference from previous iterations. Monday’s tutorial sessions – single classes running from 10am to 6pm – usually attract smaller crowds as most of GDC’s attendees hold out for the hour-long sessions and expo later in the week, but the expanding breadth of the event proved that notion false. Also, more international reporters and attendees were present than in years past, and personifying the growing influence of the conference, Capcom, Konami and Square Enix were all slated to make appearances – companies who’ve never before appeared at GDC.

Tutorial offerings were broad, covering every aspect of game development from programming to game design to business aspects. Of note was the Serious Games Summit, a mini-event focusing on the widespread adaptation of games and game mechanics for non-game scenarios and as training aids. Stretching the traditional notions of what a game is, Serious Games look poised to crack an entire new sub-genre of the industry wide open, as more and more