This is the second major conference for me and the first Game Developers Conference. I really didn't know what to expect. For Comic Con, I had an idea. I'd seen coverage and knew about what went on at said events. For GDC ... not so much. However, I have learned much and have met many interesting people. And after seeing much of the conference, I've determined the unspoken theme for GDC 2009 is microtransactions. I've seen so many free-to-play games that depend on those, and it seems to be a major focus in this economy.

Back to my preparedness, or lack thereof. For Comic Con, editor/owner of GamersInfo.net Kelly Heckman wasn't available. I had to do a lot of planning and organizing. For GDC, Kelly is around. This is more of her bread and butter. She's been in the industry awhile and has become my mentor. I wasn't really sure what I should be checking out, but she had some things in mind. So, I tried to the best of my ability to check out as much as possible.

For the first couple of days, I sat in on some of the summits. The first day, I went to a bit of the Casual Game Summit. The first two sessions were introductions, and since I basically knew only that casual games exist and that I enjoy them, these were very helpful and informative talks. I learned a bit more about what it takes to make casual games and where the industry is going and how it's spreading to broaden its audience. Speakers included Kenny Shea Dinkin of Playfirst and Diner Dash fame, Steve Meretyzky of Playdom, Gabe Zichermann of rmbr, David Fox of iWin and David Rohrl of Zynga. Each contributed much to my mental database of casual gaming knowledge.

The next big thing for me (and Kelly) was a lunch date/interview with Eric Williamson, Bob Jensen and David Sobolovfrom the Screen Actors Guild. That was a fun lunch. David has done voice acting for many games, such as Halo Wars and Call of Duty. The trio wanted to get the word out about the importance of using professional voice actors in video games. I couldn't agree more with them. The better the voice acting, the better a gamer is immersed in a game. It makes the experience that much better sometimes. But they weren't trying to sell to gamers as much as they want to reach makers of games.

A lot of the sessions after the first day got a bit deeper into the details of making games. They were a bit over my head. I plan on checking out the PowerPoint presentations from a lot of those so that I can learn at my own pace and do a LOT of looking stuff up. I like doing that anyway. Learning is fun for me. I've spent a lot of my time here wondering the booths, checking out developers and the various technologies used to make games. That's definitely been a neat experience.

I've also gotten the chance to see a lot of video games, which I hope to get written up and posted soon. I know Kelly has seen a bunch of things, too. We'll see how much we can get written and posted within the next week. I'm pretty sure I still have some games to write up from Comic Con. No one said I was perfect.

Some of the games I got to check out included Warrior Epic, Clones, RUSE (which brings about a brilliant new technology), Atlantica Online, Burn Zombie Burn (which may be a good reason to get a PlayStation 3), Space Invaders Extreme, and Punch Out for the Wii (which is MY next desired game).

Thus far, GDC has been a flurry of game giants (Hideo Kojima's keynote address was awesome and EXTREMELY informative for this newbie), the exchange of business cards and random free stuff. It's definitely been good times thus far. I hope to get more up soon — as soon as I get another moment to breathe.