By Jon Lewin

There were over 2,000 games in the 2010 major league baseball season, and the creators of MLB 2K11 looked at video from almost every one of them while preparing the 2011 version of the baseball simulation game, according to game designer Sean Bailey. “These videos are the same broadcasts that fans at home watch,” says Bailey, a developer with 2K Sports. Bailey shares insights into the painstaking process of getting the simulations right, including bringing top baseball talent like the Philadelphia Phillie's star pitcher Roy Halladay into the studio. 

By John Gaudiosi

When it comes to video games, Valve Software was one of the early game studios to emphasize the importance of interactive narrative in shooters like Half-Life. Storytelling remains an integral part of all of Valve’s games. And Erik Wolpaw is one of the top writers at the Seattle game studio.

Wolpaw began his career as a journalist writing for game sites like GameSpot.com and founding OldManMurray.com. That work led to a job at Double Fine Productions for Psychonauts, and in 2006 he was honored with a Game Developers Choice Award for best writing.

Gabe Newell hired Wolpaw at Valve, where he’s worked on the story and dialogue for games like Portal 1, Left 4 Dead and now Portal 2. Wolpaw talks about the creation of Valve’s much-anticipated Portal 2, which ships in April, in this exclusive interview.

Roger Chandler

In a nutshell, it seems that the players, the games, the business models, the game delivery mechanisms, the platforms, the market size and the way players interact with games have all changed. And through it all, the PC -- the most open and innovative of all the gaming platforms -- is experiencing a renaissance. PCs in general are morphing into different form factors, including netbooks, tablets and media-centric designs. Developers are starting to riff on platform technologies -- like stereoscopic 3D, touchscreens, facial recognition, solid-state drives, Z-cameras and wireless display connections -- to make games more immersive and fun. Soon, it may be the norm for integrated cameras to map your face to your in-game character, mimicking your expressions in real time. Games may sense and translate not only your motions, but also your emotions.

By John Gaudiosi

“Technology plays a huge role for the modern soldier, first and foremost in regards to communication,” says Stuart White, senior producer on Ghost Recon: Future Soldier , due to be released this year. “Ask any soldier what would happen if they found themselves in the field with no communication to base or their squadmates. Coordination of movement allows a small squad of soldiers to become a devastating unit on the modern battlefield. This coordination happens because of technology.

Of course, when it comes to video games, communication technology doesn’t play as large of a role as the fun factor of weapons and gadgets. To combine a true military feel with a great game, the Future Soldier development team in Paris had to blend real-world tactics with near-future technology, and then factor in fun and engaging gameplay to deliver the experience Ghost Recon fans expect.

By Matt Ployhar

I’ve been following slates, tablets and similar PC form factors for quite a while now. They’ve actually been around for a very long time when one comes to think of it -- at least a decade from what I can tell. There’s a ton of hype around them all of a sudden, since Apple released the iPad over a year ago. So where will they go next?

Will consoles try to jump on the bandwagon? Will slates and tablets be able to displace laptops? What about netbooks? Then we have Windows 8 coming down the pipeline. It’s probably a good bet that Microsoft will throw a ton of eggs into the slate basket.

It’s been 30 years since writer/director Steven Lisberger first started working on bringing his vision of TRON  to the big screen. The film ushered in a new generation of computer animation, which allowed audiences to be transported into cyberspace and experience video game battles within the mainframe. TRON was the first movie to have a hit video game tie-in at the arcade, which seamlessly connected the film universe with the real world’s burgeoning video game industry.

One of the people who were both influenced by TRON and active in cyberspace was architect-turned-commercial director Joe Kosinski, who ended up working with Lisberger to bring TRON: Legacy to the big screen. Now Walt Disney Pictures  is bringing TRON: Legacy to the big screen, using the latest computer graphics technology to introduce a new wave of video game battles on the Grid. And Disney Interactive Studios  has enlisted Propaganda Games  to develop the TRON: Evolution game, which tells the story of what’s been going on within the TRON mythology over the past three decades.

Matt Ployhar

Recently, I was featured in a prominent publication in an article about PC gaming. What I’m reminded of is how easy it is to be taken out of context -- for right or wrong.

The article was well-written and I stand by most of what I’m quoted as saying. A few things, however, were lost in translation. It’s easy to forget that the people listening to me may not also share my viewpoints, convictions, experiences or vantage point, and therefore, it’s all too easy to be misinterpreted.

Whether you’re developing a new game or have an existing game that you want to port to the netbook platform, it’s important to know how to optimize it. The netbook market is growing steadily and creating new opportunities for game developers on this mobile platform. According to a 2009 report from the NPD Group, nearly 40 million netbooks have shipped so far, and around 139 million are projected to be shipped by 2013.

The best way to show you how to optimize your game for netbooks is to describe what we did when creating a demo for Fireflies. It’s a great example of the easy optimizations and quick performance gains you can achieve when developing games for this fast-growing market.

The perennial goal of creative professionals working on animation and special effects for motion pictures and television -- as well as computer-aided design (CAD) professionals -- is to deliver top-notch work on time and under budget.

While production times might be expected to decrease in direct proportion to available processing power, the ambitions of creative professionals are outpacing Moore’s law, which says that transistor density will double approximately every two years. Evermore complex rendering algorithms deliver increasing levels of visual subtlety and devour advances in processing power as quickly as they become available.