Best Games of the Show
So, which game was the best one at this year's show? Each year, IGDA, the International Game Developers Assoc., holds an open nomination program, to let the game development teams be judged by their peers, and gives out its Game Developers Choice Awards. The game chosen as best this year was Gears of War (GOW for short), produced by Epic Games for Microsoft Game Studios, produced by the team of Cliff Bleszinski, Michael Capps and Rod Fergusson. GOW also got the awards for best technology and best visual arts. It was emblematic of the GDC that the game designers were honored specifically, rather than the just the game publisher -- and that one of those designers used all of his time on stage praising the other four nominated games (Okami, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Wii Sports), something you are not likely to see at the Oscars.

Best audio for a game was for Guitar Hero, again, this time for its version II incarnation, produced by Harmonix Music Systems for RedOctane. The best game design went to (with wild cheers from the audience) Wii Sports, by Nintendo.

The Independent Games Festival awarded prizes for games created with more modest budgets, but received just as enthusiastically by the audience. Bit Blot's dreamlike 2D underwater adventure game Aquaria won top honors, as well as a $20,000 prize, big bucks for a small indie team. The awards for design innovation and for audio were handed to Everyday Shooter, by Queasy Games, and that for technical excellence went to Bang!Howdy! from Three Rings. The audience award went to Castle Crashers, while the best student game prize went to Toblo, by DigiPen Institute of Technology.

A relatively new award in the industry, but reflecting a growing area of interest, was the best mod game prize, won by Cut Corner Company Productions for its corporate office adventure game, Weekday Warrior, a modded adaptation of the popular Half-Life 2 game.

It was hard to tell the winners from the losers at the after-hours parties, which appeared to have lower budgets than previous years, but the same high spirits. Partygoers from studios large and small sat side by side as equals, consuming both of their major food groups (Pepsis and pizza) and discussing every conceivable topic related to game creation as if their lives depended on it.

The Independent Games Festival awarded prizes for games created with more modest budgets, but received just as enthusiastically by the audience.

Cool New Stuff
Location Based Games or Location Based Services (LBGs or LBSs) are an interesting new application. These games use actual locations as the gaming environment, and the player has to physically move his/her body along with the mobile gaming device to get around the game area. Could this be the end of the couch potato? "Location based games are a great way to get out and explore a town or environment, and to get some exercise," said Alex Tikhman, the founder of Tik Games, which has two such games, Jewel Chaser and Geo Universe, on the market. Autodesk is a major supporter of location based applications, with a corporate group, Autodesk Location Services, dedicated to this for games and other applications. The company offers its developers a wide range of services to help them get into the market, including getting locations of players and points of interest (via triangulation from cell phone towers), downloads of maps, aerial photos and other geographical information, and middleware for applications. One application offered, for instance, is Chaperone, which allows a subscriber such as a parent to draw a circle, called a "fence," around an area of interest such as a school. When a child crosses the fence, the parent is notified via an SMS message that the kid is now approaching school; when the child crosses the fence leaving school, the parent gets another message. The same basic system could obviously also be used for potential customers approaching a restaurant, for visitors approaching a tourist attraction, or for game players approaching an objective in a gaming environment.

Another interesting development is Organic Motion's new motion capture system, an unusual MoCap setup that uses no markers (neither magnetic points, white puffballs or lights) or body suits on the person whose motion is being recorded. Instead, 10 specially-equipped video cameras track the entire body in three dimensions, and the resulting complete data can be displayed in realtime. The advantage of tracking a whole form, instead of points along his/her surface, is that there is no complicated calculation to go through to digitally interpolate what the actual body was doing, a painful process that often takes a long time, is fraught with error and inevitably leads to re-takes.

"You don't have to have an engineer to run this system, you can have your artist run it," said Andrew Tschesnok, Organic Motion's ceo. Indeed, during the demo, held next to a staging area with a white background, with cameras connected to a desktop workstation and display, an animator was both capturing the action -- and directing the model for different and subtle changes in movement. The model was in ordinary street clothes -- no need for the black mime-like suits and precise reflective marker positioning we have all grown familiar with. The system is first calibrated to recognize the form (e.g., a human), and then defines natural joints and edges on the body and tracks those, rather than dots or other markers; all this takes a couple of minutes. After the person started moving, the system streamed the data directly into Autodesk's MotionBuilder, and the display of the 3D moving digital form was essentially realtime. In addition to capturing pure motion, the system can also capture meshes and surface textures.