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The Game Developers Conference has arrived in San Francisco and the boss people gave me the day to take it all in.

Unfortunately, the pass I received didn't let me get into the high-profile lectures or tutorials, so I have no new insight in the magnificent spectacles unveiled in the backrooms of Microsoft's presentations. Like some Victorian child stuck in the cold, I pressed my face against the proverbial window and glanced in before being shooed away. Back to chimney sweeping for me.

GDC, to its credit, is less about finished products and game announcements and more about discussions of gaming trends. The rooms are large presentations of gaming gurus or round-table discussions with panelists. If E3 is gaming¡¯s Oscars, then this is the SAG award show that no one televises.

I wandered over to the expo part of the conference, which had many different developers sporting posters of their products, and many offered free candy in unmarked white vans. Ubisoft, Eidos, THX, Relic, Activision, and many others were all represented. The Blizzard booth was pretty packed, but I found their swag rather lacking. They replayed old Starcraft and World of Warcraft videos and prominently displayed a Starcraft space marine statue. Granted, Blizzard could simply have put a rubber band and some lint on display and fanboys would have wondered how to preorder it¡ªas top dogs pretty much everyone wants to talk to them. That¡¯s the other element of this conference¡ªnetworking. Everyone was shopping around their resumes, from engineers to artists to technical artists. It was really fun to tell them I had a degree in English as I swiped their free candy and ran away laughing maniacally. Being in the press is fun.

A note about the volunteers: a good way to ensure that no one will steal your commemorative GDC shirt is to make it bright neon pink.

The crowd was a mass of stiff-suited persons, PR reps, and furiously typing journalists all sitting in one corner of the enormous Moscone center. They didn't seem very happy about being here, and sipped cappuccinos nervously while the throngs moved around them. Most of the upper-level media persons were in the tutorials and conferences, so I imagine these people were either their personal assistants or a legion of Jack Thompson's spies.

Later, I did find myself listening in on a discussion about the future of MMOs. MMOs, like World of Warcraft, have drawn in a great deal of casual gamers to PC gaming. Now, many developers are trying to make it even easier to jump into a game. One developer talked of creating a Flash-only MMO that wouldn't require game discs, so the player can just hop into the game. While I'm skeptical of the graphics and nuance of such a game, such concerns aren't going to affect the likes of casual gamers who are looking for the next Snood.

There was also a discussion about rewards and end-games for MMORPGs, which I recognized as being one of the constant complaints of a certain MMO-playing friend of mine. Essentially, after leveling up your character, completing X number of quests, and exploring enough of the world, you get bored. There is no way to entirely "beat" the game. This doesn't bother some people, but it bothered him. Also, it bothers enough people to cause them to unsubscribe from their MMOs, and that matters to developers.

After that, I wandered through the XNA area and enjoyed all the best games of the last year running on the best machines of three years ago. Or at least, that's how they played to me.

Gears of War was one of the games people could demo, and it serves as a good jumping off point for one of Microsoft's announcements.: Gears of War 2 is due out in November. The trailer basically showed nothing new except an even more stylized form of violence and a sense that this game will be the promised second half of the first game. I loved Gears of War for its atmosphere and beautiful depiction of the chaos of gunfighting. But, I also felt like the game ended about 10 hours too early.

Bioshock and Portal won a bunch of awards at the Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony, which no one was really surprised by. Even yours truly thinks these games were pretty fun, but I'm concerned about the state of the gaming world when once again, one of the top two games is made by Valve (Portal) and the other one is the sum of a retread (Bioshock = System Shock 1,2 + Ayn Rand).

Also, for some reason, I saw numerous men walking around in kilts. I thought I should mention that.

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