For the last week I've been at the Game Developer's Conference in San Jose. I spent the first two days at the Serious Games Summit, giving two talks on Monday. Then I gave two more talks on Friday during traditional GDC. It was a busy week and thus I didn't even try to liveblog during the conference. However, I thought I'd have a go at summarizing the week, not for completeness but for commentary. Click on through to read my initial thoughts, which I'll try to add to over the following week.

The Serious Games Summit this year was a mixed success, I thought. As a member of the advisory board for the event, I remember feeling that the submissions this year were overly obtuse, or arcane, or product-focused. Of course, I didn't see all the sessions due to concurrent scheduling. The panels I saw were well-planned and executed, including Mass Audience Issues for Serious Games, Business Model Case Study Blasts. I was really looking forward to the SGS-equivalent of the popular Game Design Rant, called Can Serious Games Work? and featuring Jim Gee, Heather Kelly, and Ben Sawyer. But I was disappointed that the discussion was somewhat muddled and vague rather than taking the form of direct attack. I'll see if I can get something like that going in DC or for next year in San Francisco.

My own SGS talks went well, at least by measure of attendance--the room was packed and attendees lined the walls and aisles. My first talk, Politics, Religion, and Ideology: New Approaches to Biased Games outlined a new approach to game design focusing on simulating worldview, based on research Michael Mateas and I are conducting at the Georgia Tech Experimental Game Lab. We debuted our controversial idea, building a game about the abortion debate, which promptly produced coverage by MTV News, Next Gen Biz News, and some subtle but interesting criticism from Lifesite. The second talk was a panel organized by Mary Flanagan called Serious Play: At the Edge of Education Gaming, which Mary has blogged about over on Grand Text Auto. Shown were demos of three really fantastic programming instruction tools, Rapunzel, Scratch, and Alice. I closed with a sort of problematization of procedural literacy and a challenge to think of it more broadly.

It was nice to have the GDC back in San Jose for a final send-off before departing for good. Last year's event at the Moscone in San Francisco was good, but we all felt that the familiar central ambience of the Fairmont bar was missing. But this year was just too big for San Jose: 12,000 people by CMP's count. The sessions were overfilled and the fire marshall didn't allow standing-room. The queues for the keynote wrapped all the way around the building. So, the conference was a bit of a challenge.

GDC coverage is everywhere and I'm not going to link to it obsessively; you can use Google and Technorati to get the job done. But I will point to coverage of a few key sessions, including the What's Next? panel; Will Wright's keynote on design research and astrobiology; the Game Design Challenge: Nobel Peace Prize theme; and Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold's talk on prototyping. I had two talks on Friday. In Good Design for In-Game Advertising I actually ragged on in-game advertising and argued for product simulation; it was a successful talk, but a few folks told me afterward that they wished I'd submitted a different name... they would have come to the talk knowing the theme. I think there was one advertiser/agency person in my talk, and no brand managers or the like, in my mind proving that advertisers aren't serious about understanding games, but only about using them for their own violent purposes.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the last-session panel The Game Studies Download, featuring Jane McGonigal, Mia Consalvo, and myself was a total success. The panel was a summary of the top research findings for game designers from the last year. We were hoping for a modest turnout, but we totally filled the room and people were being turned away -- Jane blogged a photo, and Mia summarized at Terra Nova, actively blogged by Alice and Raph. I've left my comments on the panel over at Terra Nova as part of the discussion going on there.

Iwata-san's Nintendo keynote is worth mentioning in a bit more detail (although Alice typed it up in full detail if you want it all -- we got a preview of Zelda for DS, for example). Iwata talked at length about Brain Age for the Nintendo DS, which comes out presently in North America. The title has sold over 6 million units in Japan, and many serious games proponents have been citing it for some time now as a promising mainstream serious game. I'm fond of the concept and agree that titles like Brain Age, Nintendogs, and Electroplankton can only help expand the possibility space for games, or at least for software that runs on the DS. But it's important to note that such games do not necessarily help videogames with an agenda, games about politics, social issues, education, and so forth. Let's face it, how big an innovation is sudoku on DS anyway (there's already a GBA sudoku, if you were wondering). True, Brain Age offers cognitive exercise, a new hype in serious games and casual games, but that's not the kind of possibility space expansion I'm personally interested in. Don't get me wrong, it's good to see any expansion at all, but we shouldn't settle for brain exercises as a replacement for social critique, for example.