The 2008 Game Developers Conference is currently consuming San Francisco, clogging the city with the best and brightest (and assorted others) the industry has to offer. I’m not there, alas, but by means of a series of tubes connecting my computrons to the other side of the country, I can at least keep up with the gobs of exciting news and lectures the last several days have had to offer. A quick summary of some of the neater bits:

At Microsoft’s keynote address on Wednesday, the company unveiled their plans for fostering the sort of indie development community enjoyed by the PC. The Community Arcade is a place for users to upload and share games built with XNA, a suite of simple (yet versatile and powerful) development tools custom tuned for creating downloadable content for the 360. For a yearly subscription, console owners can download the full versions of any and everything uploaded to the Community Arcade and then rate their favorites. It’s a fantastic idea, and the exact sort of thing I want a home gaming system to be able to do in 2008. The first batch of demos are up to give people a free taste of what to expect, which I’ll probably be talking about more later. (Via Joystiq)

This gets a bit turned around, so bear with me: Games site Kotaku did an interview with Ken Levine, Creative Director on Bioshock, in which the somewhat disappointing ending of the game came up. Levine said he underestimated how the Big Moment just before that would effect people, a statement that Kotaku in their infinite wisdom (and want for click-throughs) decided to interpret as him admitting it “failed”. This week, Levine talked at GDC about storytelling in games and how the best approach was to keep things simple (quote: “The bad news for storytellers is that nobody cares about your stupid story.”), which stuck in Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker’s head as a bit of a contradiction to other statements on narrative in games, leading to a nice little piece wondering which Levine was the real one. Alec Meer responded with a longer, also nice bit of disambiguation, which unfortunately lead things to their natural conclusion. Despite all this being born out of a bit of needless site hits mongering, it’s nice to see Bioshock is still the sort of game to generate such debate. And pictures of Ken Levine’s lack of eyes.

Both the Independent Games Festival and Game Developer’s Choice Awards have announced their winners, and it’s hard to thing of more deserving choices. IGF results here, Choice Award winners here. (via GameSetWatch)

Jane McGonigal, general smart person and the designer behind several ARGs (Alternate Reality Games) and other games involving lots of people running around being silly, has written a paper entitled Why I Love Bees: A Case Study in Collective Intelligence Gaming (link opens PDF file). In it, she discusses the tendency for collective intelligence spontaneously happening among ARG players. I took part in The Beast, the first truly successful, world-wide ARG built around the film A.I, and have seen the events she discusses here happen first hand. It’s an amazing thing, seeing thousands of players from around the world pooling their experience, knowledge, and resources to solve a puzzle that reacts to their progress and changes in real-time. Not GDC related, but fascinating all the same. (via Boing Boing)

And finally, LEGO are using GDC as an excuse to leak a few details about their upcoming MMO, LEGO Universe.. While information is scant, what there is sounds extremely fun, potentially offering the sort of fun and creative freedom needed to draw in those put off by the level grinding stats-game of World of Warcraft and its imitators. Concept art ripped directly from my dreams and one particularly cool idea await you at the link. (via Game|Life)

Filed under: link roundup