Just a heads up to a series of great posts over at http://www.sirlin.net/ about the Game Developer’s Conference. So far I’ve read Sirlin’s report on the pre-GDC day, day one, and day two.

I follow Sirlin’s posts on his blog. He’s a game designer that knows street fighter in-depth (worked on balancing Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD, which I really wish was available in Japan) that I learned about back in my days on alt.games.sf2. If you don’t know what that is (most people probably don’t) then don’t worry about it; USENET is basically dead now anyway. But it was a great forum back in the day talking about Street Fighter and game balance in that area. A few of the people from that forum have gone on to lead interesting lives in the game development community.

Me, not so much. But I really enjoy reading about game design. One of the reasons I don’t think I’ll ever play any Facebook games (and to some degree, MMOs) is because when you look at how these things are designed, a lot of the time they just break down to skinner boxes. I’ll stick to Street Fighter (competition and natural dopamine) and RPGs (interesting stories, some number crunching and optimization) thank you very much.

Definitely check out Sirlin’s posts though, starting from the pre-GDC day, day 1, and day 2.