2008 Paris GDC Announces Quantic Dream, Sony Lectures, Art Exhibit

Author: by Staff

Paris GDC organizers announced today an art exhibition, a line-up of research sessions, new speakers, and that a limited number of passes are available before the event sells out. Video game professionals who wish to attend Paris GDC, the second French edition of the Game Developers Conference set for June 23-24 at the Coeur Défense Convention Centre, should register online at the Paris GDC website. A new art gallery feature, the Entertainment Design Expo is presented by Connection Events and The Building Studios, an entertainment design studio initiated by Viktor Antonov. This non-profit project aims at promoting art through video games. Khang Le (Project Offset), Stephan Martiniere (Uru), Daniel Dociu (Guild Wars) and Jeff Ballinger (Team Fortress 2) will exhibit original masterpieces at the Paris GDC 2008. Said Viktor Antonov and Svetlana Ilieva, co-organizers of the Entertainment Design Expo, “Contemporary concept designers, with their superb technical skills and wild imagination are our best tour guides for a trip to far away galaxies and into the world of modern science fiction. The Entertainment Design Expo presents the work of four of the most influential concept artists in the gaming industry, all recognized for creating dream worlds of mystery and beauty." In a new addition to the development-focused talks, research sessions will be presented by the leading European and French research laboratories. These sessions will cover topics such as procedural generation of worlds, perceptual audio rendering, and emotional and communicative virtual human. The research sessions are supported by the French clusters cap digital and Imaginove - whose main objective is to enhance collaboration between the research laboratories and the video game industry. The latest main conference speakers confirmed include: Allan Murphy (Microsoft); Lionel Lemarié (Sony Computer Entertainment Europe); Ian Baverstock (Kuju); Chris Mottes (Deadline Games); Guillaume de Fondaumiere (Quantic Dream); Franc Hauselmann (Ubisoft); and several others. Conference organizers have previously announced that Blizzard's Rob Pardo, Battlefield Heroes' Ben Cousins and Mark Healey and Alex Evans, co-founders of Little Big Planet developer Media Molecule are some of the keynote speakers for the event. Other notable speakers include Valve's Kim Swift discussing Portal, Obsidian's J.E. Sawyer on 'Developer Facilitation of End-User Content Creation', and many more. Interested parties can visit the Paris GDC website for the complete list of speakers.