Gabe Zichermann (b. 1974) is an entrepreneur, author, highly rated public speaker and gamification thought leader. He is the chair of the Gamification Summit and Workshops, and is co-author of the book “Game-Based Marketing” (Wiley, 2010) where he makes a compelling case for the use of games and game mechanics in everyday life, the web and business. Gabe is also a board member of StartOut.org and facilitator for the NYC chapter of the Founder Institute. A native of Canada and resident of NYC, Gabe frequently muses about games and the world at http://Gamification.Co

A selection of free and members-only videos, audio recordings and slides from the 2011 Game Developers Conference, which took place earlier this month in San Francisco, are now available to watch on GDC’s Vault website.

Included in the free material are the classic game postmortems which took place this year, all of which include slides and footage of early builds, design documents and insight from their creators. Highlights include Eric Chahi on Another World (Out Of The World), and how during development he became obsessed with what everyday objects, notably potatoes, might look like built from polygons. John Romero and Tom Hall conduct their first Doom postmortem, showing off alpha versions (including the first level built in Romero's editor) and Hall's aptitude for interpretive dance.

Challenge and Change - DLDwomen

You can learn more by attending a rare tech talk by Vint, presented by the Greyglers*: Reimagining the Internet: If wed known then what we know now, what would we have done differently?

Back in the Internet's design phase, Bob Kahn and I spent six months developing concepts and architecture and a year creating the TCP specification, but we didn't know that the idea would work. We concentrated on solving the problems we envisioned, such as networks that couldn't handle each other's packet lengths. Security against direct attacks and authentication of sources weren't high on the agenda. Now that we have spam, DDOS, viruses, and worms, we look back and think about what we might have done differently had we realized that we were creating a global infrastructure for the 21st century!

This post is partly a (two month late) response to Chris Hecker’s GDC 2010 rant entitled Please Finish Your Game. It also condenses some rough thoughts I’ve long held about motivation and game making. It took some effort to edit it into a coherent form, so I apologize in advance if it’s a tad rambling.

Firstly, this week's rant is about the arrogance of games who think their own linear, often noninteractive story is more important than the experience I wish to have with the game mechanics. I make an "all games should do X" statement, which is kind of risky and presumptuous, but I stand by it.