GDC 2008: The Highlights From Monday

Author: by Staff

With a host of simultaneous subsummits, Game Developers Conference 2008 - held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco - has got off to a dynamic start. Gamasutra has been covering all the major keynotes from the casual, independent, serious, online world and mobile summits at the show on our dedicated GDC 2008 page. Here's some of Monday's highlights... - Casual Summit Keynote: PlayFirst’s Welch On A More Innovative Casual Future "At his keynote for the 2008 Game Developers Conference Casual Game Summit, PlayFirst CEO John Welch said that even with an overwhelming and diverse userbase, the casual front is still just emerging with innovation, urging publishers to take bigger risks." - WiM Keynote: Koster Talks Potential Of Metaverse "At his 2008 Worlds in Motion Summit keynote, Areae co-founder Raph Koster decided to be a little cynical, showing photos of Club Penguin, and glamorous Second Life characters with torn jeans -- and then followed them with unsettling slides of Darfur and Haiti - suggesting that "we're kinda irrelevant" as an industry." - IGS: Inside The Making Of Aquaria "In a well-received Independent Games Summit lecture, Derek Yu and Alec Holowka from Bit-Blot discussed Aquaria, the IGF Grand Prize winner from last year, presenting a postmortem of their critically acclaimed 2D underwater action title." - SGS Keynote: Sawyer, Smith On Serious Gaming For Life "Kicking off GDC 2008's Serious Games Summit, Digitalmill's Ben Sawyer and University of Central Florida's Peter Smith took the opportunity to reflect on the progress made in the movement's past five years, and to define its future as game technology as applications for life." - GDC Casual Summit: Blue Fang's Meretzky Defines Casual Games "Kicking off GDC 2008's Casual Games Summit, Blue Fang senior designer Steve Meretzky (Zoo Tycoon) broke down major characteristics of the ever-increasing subset of casual games, outlining its history from Pong to Solitaire to Bejeweled, and its audience-mixing future with games like Peggle." - GDC Mobile: Tetris - Best Or Worst Mobile Game Ever? "Tetris is the ur-text of casual games, exerting a deep influence on game design over the twenty-three years since its creation - but is it the worst, or best cellphone game ever? At GDC Mobile, Rick Marazzani investigates..." - GDC Mobile 2008: Gameloft’s Guillemot On 'Fast Life, Fast Media' "In his opening keynote for GDC Mobile 2008, Michel Guillemot, president and CEO of Gameloft, took the stage to present his take on the way consumers consume media in the 21st century, arguing that they no longer need to be educated that games are available on their phones, but now "rule the market.""