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.

Heracles vs. FC Twente goal celebration screenshot courtesy of http://www.footballmanager.com.

By John Tyrrell

 Second only to the terraces surrounding the hallowed turf of the nation’s football (soccer) grounds, the pub is the next most popular setting for British football fans. So it’s fitting that the offices of Sports Interactive Limited, the creators of the world’s foremost and multi-million-selling football management simulation series, should be right on top of an establishment with big-screen match coverage and a solid draught beer selection. The William Blake Pub in central London has borne witness to many impassioned discussions about football - and probably just as many again about the game’s virtual progeny, the revered Football Manager series.

In Football Manager 2011, players manage their favorite team from some 50 global leagues, buy and sell players and interact with the press and plan tactics - all with the ultimate goal of topping the league and filling the boardroom trophy cabinet at the end of the season. The game’s 3D match engine lets players watch every bout in real time, taking the game far beyond its previous 2D top-down presentation toward something ever closer to the real thing.

William M. "Trip" Hawkins III - founder of Electronic Arts and father of the 3DO console - needs no introduction to serious gamers. But three decades after writing the blueprint for the PC and video game business, his latest creation - social games start-up Digital Chocolate  - is rewriting the rules again.

Originally a developer of games for mobile phones, the company has shifted its focus to Facebook and other social networks to tremendous success. It’s garnered more than 20 million monthly users within a year with hits like Millionaire City , MMA Pro Fighter  and NanoStar Castles . Here, Hawkins explains why he believes social gaming and virtual goods are the future of interactive entertainment.

With the advent of multiprocessor computers, game programming has become a lot more complicated. Given a 3 GHz quad core and a fast video card, Ghostbusters will be able to keep all four cores 100-percent utilized in heavy action. During the development of that game, which is based upon the movie franchise, we were able to accomplish this feat.

Jun Takeuchi has gained a prominent voice in the gaming industry in the last few years, urging Japanese game designers to catch up with North American producers, adding co-op gaming to a refresh of Resident Evil, and pushing Capcom to embrace global gaming. Capcom uses the MT Framework engine to bring games to multiple platforms, and the company works hard to build support for threading and multicore hardware.

Garrett Romaine recently caught up with Mr. Takeuchi (and his interpreter) to discuss his start in gaming and his thoughts on the industry’s future.

Interactive entertainment’s answer to art-house films is indie game development. Titles like Minecraft , Recettear  and World of Goo  have captured a legion of forward-thinking fans’ and bedroom coders’ imaginations alike. But despite consistently raising the bar for innovation and creativity, life left of the keyboard isn’t all fun and games. Dave Gilbert, founder of indie adventure-game studio Wadjet Eye Games  (The Blackwell Legacy , Puzzle Bots ), explains the indie life to Scott Steinberg.

Rally driving is dominated by one thing: four tires. Every spectacular corner, power slide, or windshield-cracking collision is determined by the complex interactions between those spinning pieces of tread and the unpredictability of an unmade road surface. Small wonder that even after 10 years of the multi-million-selling Colin McRae Rally  games -- or DiRT, as the games are known in North America -- U.K. developer and publisher Codemasters  still maintains a laser-like focus on simulating that pedal-to-the-metal, rubber-on-the-gravel reality.

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.

Veering away from painstaking authenticity and turning back to the white-knuckle arcade races which initially defined it, high-stakes driving game Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit appears to be cruising in the fast lane toward success. You can credit not only an impressive sensation of speed, but also the introduction of savvier computer-controlled opponents and a suite of new social networking elements that enhance online play. Producer Hamish Young drove by to tell us how publisher Electronic Arts is steering the storied franchise back on course.