GDC 2011 Announces Summit Line-Up, Calls For Submissions

Author: by Staff

Game Developers Conference organizers have announced additional Summits for GDC 2011, including a new GDC Smartphone Summit and the return of the Social & Online Games Summit. The organizers have also opened up a call for Summit lecture submissions until October 14th. The GDC Summits take place Monday, February 28th and Tuesday, March 1st, 2011, the first two days of the historic 25th annual Game Developers Conference. They offer deep-dive content on a variety of notable game industry topics, ahead of the main conference which runs Wednesday, March 2nd through Friday, March 4th. This year, the conference is introducing the GDC Smartphone Summit, which brings top developers from around the world to share knowledge and concrete takeaways on the smartphone and related platforms. These include breakout game platforms like Apple's iPhone, the iPad, Android OS phones and tablets, Blackberry and a variety of other notable handheld devices. The summits also include the vibrant Social & Online Games Summit, with a packed agenda devoted to social network games, free-to-play web titles, and microtransaction-powered online games. 2011's GDC will also see the return of the signature Independent Games Summit, highlighting the top indie game creators and lessons. the Summit will run as part of the Independent Games Festival at the show. In addition, the 2011 Serious Games Summit is being built around two themes, with day one focusing on health and healthcare, covering research and the many commercialized games in the health & wellness space that have launched the past few years. Day two will be devoted to the rising trend of 'gamification' -- the concept of building game-like incentives into non-game applications to address issues like productivity, health, and marketing. The Summit roster is rounded out by the extremely popular AI (artificial intelligence) Summit, plus a revamped Game Education Summit, and the return of the Game Localization Summit -- with a number of notable Monday and Tuesday tutorials also to be announced in the near future. Each individual GDC Summit has its own specialized set of expert advisors from that particular submarket, including notables like Playdom's Steve Meretzky (Social & Online Games Summit), the Institute for the Future's Jane McGonigal (Serious Games Summit), Disney Mobile/Tapulous' Bart Decrem (GDC Smartphone Summit), and Intrinsic Algorithm's Dave Mark (AI Summit). The GDC Summit Advisory committees will be looking for submissions in the areas of: - AI Summit - Game Education Summit - Game Localization Summit - GDC Smartphone Summit - Independent Games Summit - Social & Online Games Summit - Serious Games Summit Organized by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website, GDC 2011 marks the 25th anniversary of the game industry’s most comprehensive professionals-only event, taking place February 28th - March 4th at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. For more information regarding the submission phases and the guidelines for submissions for the GDC summits visit the official GDC Summits submission page.