By John Gaudiosi

Electronic Arts used the Game Developers Conference this month to offer an initial look at its first-person shooter sequel, Medal of Honor Warfighter. Danger Close Games, its developer, is expanding the fight against terror by taking its Tier 1 Operators on a contemporary globe-trotting adventure to such exotic locales as the Philippines and the Somali coast. The game also features new vehicles on players’ new missions, like an on-rails boat ride through a monsoon-stricken city.Here, Rich Farley, creative director at Danger Close Games, talks about what’s in store for PC gamers and gives his take on the move to modern warfare in this exclusive interview from GDC 2012.

By Gus Mastrapa

Record crowds converged on the Game Developers Conference 2012 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center earlier this month. About 22,500 attendees came to share techniques, troll for jobs and hunt for the best new tools of the trade. The conference -- now in its 26th year -- hosted hundreds of panels, workshops and talks that were aimed at educating, inspiring and inflaming video game developers. Here were my highlights:

By John Gaudiosi

One of the themes at this year’s Game Developers Conference was games for change. Electronic Arts took this concept to heart with the development of SimCity, a new PC-exclusive, 3D reboot of the franchise from Maxis that’s scheduled to ship in 2013.

The Game Changers event -- presented by EA at the W Hotel -- was hosted by Lucy Bradshaw, senior vice president of Maxis, and featured Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of the documentary An Inconvenient Truth. While Guggenheim wasn’t involved in the development of the game, he did lend his environmental star power to GDC 2012 to help showcase the social consciousness behind the new SimCity.

“Video games like SimCity allow gamers, including my own kids, to see the consequences of their actions,” says Guggenheim. “Games can educate people, without making them feel like they’re taking their medicine. SimCity gets under your skin and sticks with you.”

One of the things we like to do is talk to some of the top innovators in the industry to see what makes them tick. We’ve spoken to Matt Ployhar -- president of the PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA) -- before, but he’s been up to a lot lately, so we followed up to get a closer look.

 

 

By John Gaudiosi

Twenty years ago, a very smart college kid named Tim Sweeney started releasing Shareware games that he made at his mom’s house. And at the 2012 D.I.C.E. Summit (i.e., Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) in Las Vegas, Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games, was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame. Sweeney, who has been at the forefront of pushing technology forward with Unreal Engine 3, talks about how advances in processing power will continue to advance games. 

By John Gaudiosi

Electronic Arts’ BioWare studio has come a long way since first launching Mass Effect on the PC. What began as an epic single-player experience has expanded into a new cooperative gameplay mode with Mass Effect 3. Up to four players can engage in exclusive co-op firefights on top of the epic conclusion of the single player campaign. And speaking of Epic, that game studio’s Unreal Engine 3 technology continues to push the visuals and gameplay experience of the franchise thanks to BioWare’s many technical implementations over the years. By John Gaudiosi

By Stu Horvath

Last year, we investigated the game development program at the NYU Game Center. Founded in 2008, the center specializes in games-focused study for undergrads and grad students, but so far has only offered an undergraduate minor. Late last year, the center announced it will launch a master’s program starting in fall 2012. We spoke with director Frank Lantz about the now even-more-promising future of gaming at NYU.

We are computing in the past. Every chipset and microprocessor we use today is the product of five to 10 years of development and design. For a technology company to be successful, it must be able to not only deliver cutting-edge products, but also tailor those products for a marketplace and consumer demand that doesn’t yet necessarily exist. It’s enough to make you want to break out the crystal ball. By Stu Horvath

By Matt Ployhar

It’s that time of year, when I speculate as to what the big technology announcements and impacts are going to be for the next year. For 2012, I looked for things that will in some way have a profound short- or long-term impact on the various gaming ecosystems. So what’s in store for 2012? Some of these suggestions may seem obvious, but there are often some things taking place between the lines that may not be so apparent.

The word “convergence” won’t mean quite the same thing to the next generation as it does to us. That’s because kids today will come of age in a time when phones were used to play video games, computers could double as a private movie house, and televisions were flipped on to browse the Web. Unlike us, they’ll be living in a world where “ubiquity” is the word -- surrounded by devices.

The most interesting development of the ubiquity age isn’t that we’re surrounded by screens and able to connect to the Internet in myriad ways, from smartphones to televisions to tablets. Most fascinating is that no one device serves as the ultimate Swiss Army Knife, acting as a substitute for all the rest

Rather, we collect these devices the way golfers keep clubs. On the go, we check movie times on mobile phones. On the couch, we research that movie on a laptop PC or tablet, or we play a game of “Words With Friends” while our significant other watches the big game. Rather than seek a one-size-fits-all solution for computing, consumer behavior indicates that there’s a time and a place for every kind of screen.