GDC Gallery: Notable Speakers, Event Highlights

With this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco complete, organizers have been collecting the event's substantial volume of visual documentation. This volume chronicles many of the speakers who highlighted the main conference tracks during GDC, part of the UBM Techweb Game Network (also this website's parent company), from inspiring creative manifestos to in-depth discipline-specific talks. These include notables such as Blizzard's Rob Pardo and keynote speaker Sid Meier of Civilization fame, as well as last-minute secret speaker addition Will Wright (The Sims), and many more from the over 450 GDC speakers this year. An earlier roundup collected images from the Independent Games Festival Summit, Pavilion, and Awards. Game Developers Conference 2010 Sessions These pictures capture moments from a wide variety of talks, drawn from the considerable official GDC photo archive.

Firaxis design legend Sid Meier (Civilization, Pirates!) headlined this year's conference with his keynote "The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong)."

...and fellow design legend Will Wright (The Sims, Spore) closed out the show with his sprawling and fascinating "The Metaphysics of Game Design," initally presented under the pseudonym Phaedrus.

Warren Spector (Deus Ex, Epic Mickey) waxed curmudgeonly about the dangerous of obsessing over progress during this year's incarnation of the annual invitation-only "Lunch With Luminaries" event.

These game developers just can't wait to confer at the Game Developers Conference! Soon, they will get their chance.

How does Blizzard make so much money? It's the game design! Rob Pardo (World of Warcraft, StarCraft II) "explains it all" in a practical development lecture.

"You'll love our new game this much," gestures Peter Molyneux (Fable II, Fable III) in a detailed talk explaining the Fable series genre metamorphosis.

Much like the children, connectivity is our future. A panel of esteemed game developers consisting of, from left to right, Jason Holtman (Valve), Brian Reynolds (Zynga), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Min Kim (Nexon America), and Rob Pardo (Blizzard) discuss what it all means.

Much like connectivity, free games are our future. Kristian Segerstrale, founder of social game developer Playfish (Pet Society, Who Has the Biggest Brain?), argues that the game industry shouldn't fear the concept of "free."

Moscone Center's North Hall is overrun by game developers at the Game Developers Conference!

Noted game designers Jenova Chen (Thatgamecompany), Kim Swift (Airtight Games), Heather Kelley (Kokoromi), and Erin Robinson (Wadjet Eye Games) battle to the death novelty prize with game designs based on "real-world permadeath" during this year's Game Design Challenge. (Spoiler alert: Chen wins.)

Denki's Gary Penn was just one of numerous presenters at this year's Microtalks session, three of whom are highlighted in Gamasutra's coverage of the event.

Veteran game designer Brenda Brathwaite (Wizardry series, Train) explains how board games led her to dump electricity and learn to love design.

"We're all doomed," Chris Hecker doesn't actually really claim as he reflects on the potential dangers of gaming's nightmare scenario in his talk "Achievements Considered Harmful?"

"Now that was some mighty fine conferring," these people are probably thinking as they decompress during this year's evening Speaker Party. [More pictures of the Game Developers Conference as a whole, taken by Vincent Diamante, are available on the Official GDC Flickr stream.]