Catching up with GDC

The Game Developers Conference has been going on all week. I've been keeping up on the news stories, but haven't had a chance to blog about them. Here are some of the stories and coverage I've read this week that fit nicely with game based learning and using games in education. The first two days of GDC were set aside for a Mobile games summit and a Serious Games Summit. The Serious Games Summit produced some good data, but not as much coverage as I hoped.

- Serious Game Summit Reflections - These posts are off Henry Jenkins’ MIT blog, but they are not written by Henry. The author is at GDC and provides some of the more detailed coverage I’ve read this week

- Bartman’s blogging his experience at GDC. He’s written reflections on each session he attended – all with a focus on serious games and game based learning. There are some I found more useful, but all are interesting.

- Colonial Williamsburg: Revolution Postmortem - How Commercial Game Engines Affect Pedagogical Design

The creators of the Neverwinter Nights : Revolution mod gave a GDC presentation on Monday afternoon, but I haven’t found any news or posts about it. I was really looking forward to hearing about this session since I’ve been reading more and more about their educational game and the idea of modding commercial games for educational purposes. The closest I’ve posts I’ve found come of the Education Arcade site but they are not directly about the session. Has anyone read anything about their session?

- Next-gen.biz has a story on how laptops for 3^rd world countries opens the door for educational gaming and learning.

-The team over at Wired’s Game|Life are blogging all week long. They have a few key stories that fit in here:

How to make games that appeal to non hardcore gamers (or the other 90% of people who play)... article here

Here is Kohler's reactions to Sony announcement of the "Home" social networking features for the PS3.

I heard about the Sony's social networking ideas through 1up.com's podcast on Wednesday night. If you haven't heard about it, read Kohler's thoughts and then head over to Jenny Levine's theshiftedlibrarian to read her comments. Jenny's post is on the mark about the growing importance of social networking and the commercial success it could see.

What are you reading about GDC?