GDC 2009 was my second GDC. Actually, during my last GDC, I couldn’t attend many sessions or exhibitions because I gave a talk on the last day so I had to prepare for my lecture all the week. However, during this GDC, I had enough time to attend various sessions, keynotes and exhibitions. As far as lectures, I focused on virtual worlds and new business models for games. So, on Monday and Tuesday, I mostly attended sessions of Worlds In Motion Summit which deals with virtual worlds and online community services. Most sessions in Worlds in Motion Summit were focusing on in-game commerce and methodologies to activate useres’ social behaviors because those are the most important parts in the business of online community services. Especially, some sessions emphasized the strategy how to approach users according to their gender and age. Case studies about social games by the CEO of Playfish were also instructive. He gave a lecture about five key lessons learned from developing social networking games and explains why those lessons matters for the future of overall game industry as well as social networking services based on his experiences. Some round table sessions were fun as well. I attended a game writing round table held by Richard Dansky, a pioneering game writer from Ubisoft and a microtransaction round table held by Daniel James, the CEO of Three Rings.
Keynote lectures were also interesting. It was great chance to attend Iwata Satoru’s one-hour-long English speech. That’s because he hardly talks in public and in English. In his lecture, he talked about success factors of Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS and game design philosophy of Miyamoto Shigeru. The second session by Kojima Hideo was also interesting. His thought about the combination of game design, hardware technology and software technology was very insightful.
My another goal of this GDC was to find staff for my thesis project. I achieved the goal. I found some programmers and artist for my project at GDC. In addition, I was able to contact the most successful commercial BCI device developer, Neurosky. I met the CTO of Neurosky and talked about my thesis project. Finally, he promised me to be a technical supporter and advisor for my project.