GDC reports I found interesting:

Raph Koster, Joi Ito, Nabeel Hyatt, Matt Mihaly and Daniel James from OOO.

Web 2.0, microtransactions, casual games, virtual worlds are surfing the trend right now. The focus on talks seemed to be much more on simpler online games than massive box titles. There were lots of indirect references to Second Life and World of Warcraft but surprisingly little direct talk about either.

My talk went well. I think Daniel is reading my email since he ranted about how bad User Generated Content is as a term which was one of the highlights of my presentation. ;) From my perspective, looking at a website and just saying a site is “about UGC” is oversimplification of user motivations. Yes, on some sites the users do come to view the content being authored by other users but in many cases the driving motivation is the fact that users feel they belong to a community. In Habbo, we have a real community which adds very significant value to the user experience and is much greater a motivation to keep using the service than the content being authored.

I liked the Indie and Casual Games Summits. Of the other talks, obviously the Sony and Nintendo keynotes were interesting, but I was disappointed at both. The Free to Play, Pay for Stuff roundtables were excellent.

OOO had the best party, by far. I found out that Eric Zimmerman is a good dancer. Figures, he does martial arts as a hobby.

Biggest takeaways all came from just talking with people.