Day-One of the Game Developer's Conference, Monday, was a largely-useless logistical blur, as most Mondays usually are (That being said: I've really gotta start pre-registering for these things, instead of fumbling up at 3:50 pm to the Media desk with a fistful of business cards and/or an attendant gaggle of lovely "assistants," with which and for whom I'm slanging last-minute attendee badges.)

Screw it; there's no "show floor" on Day One anyway…and you don't want to be party to the majority of those sketchy "first-night game demos" in some already-trashed hotel suite: You show me a developer-rep with the motivations to privately-demo a game on Day One, and I'll show you a pervert.

As any regular former GDC attendee can attest, separating the wheat from the digital chaff and assessing the actual, immediate-application value of any given GDC show can be a real toss of the dice (to such an extent that "crapshoot" might be a more technically-accurate term, here)... but, God help me, I'm actually looking forward to some of the next few days' panels this time around (even the drag-ass-early-in-the-morning ones). At the moment, I'm having a hard time deciding on my as-yet, sight-unseen favorite: "Hentai, Hardcore and Hotties: Sex in Games" has some appeal (in a latent, don't-step-in-the-whiner-watchdog-group sort of way)... but I can't help but feel I'm risking some kind of potentially dangerous, Tokyo Game Show flashback; there's another that's apparently something along the lines of "Getting People to Care about Your Crappy Story" (which curiosity alone obliges me to attend). Thankfully they don't overlap, and one of them begins at a decent, Christian noon.

Good thing, too, because the Day-One/-Two Doldrums didn't stop the booze and slapped-together mixers (perhaps it was all a subconscious, precognitive, hive-minded celebration of the death knell in the DVD-format wars announced late on Day One); the Microsoft casual-games crowd shared a W Hotel ballroom-wall with newcomers Zeemote, who were pushing their new Bluetooth remote game-controller for mobile games -- a tiny, nifty little compact wireless thumbstick controller that just might finally pull mobile gamers' fingers away from the sorely-lacking input device of their badly-abused cellphone keypads. Applicable, um, applications looping on a screen behind a DJ included a Sonic Game, a simple arcade-intensive helicopter-strike title, and even a side-scrolling Tomb Raider game.

They had a geared-up Lara Croft-alike wandering around the party, too, who in fact bore a truly startling facial resemblance to Angelina Jolie (she was standing so stock-still when I first entered the party -- listening to a cell phone, I believe -- that my peripheral awareness in the low light registered her only as a very good statue: When she finally moved, just as I passed her, she scared the sh!t out of me. Why, I required a number of chilled martinis, just to recover. Frightful, I tell you.

The Electronic Arts DICE event the following day upped the stakes for both gamers and their livers, of course, giving attendees first-hand crack at the stars in the EA 2008 line-up, including Battlefield Bad Company, Mirror's Edge, and the recently-announced Battlefield Heroes.

As I write this, tomorrow looms as Day Three of the show, when things start getting serious -- panels and keynotes in earnest, demos packed like digital sardines, even the Buzz! Quiz-game Holiday Charity Challenge, wherein the dork packed with the greatest concentration of assorted trivia can have a donation made in his/her name to his/her favorite charity. The meetings and forums in the next few days have the promise of ambition, if nothing else: The Force Unleashed, a session on the "Next 20 Years of Gaming" -- all encompassed in one gathering, if you please! After that, we can all relax! -- and, dare I utter it, StarCraft 2.

(Photo courtesy of the Game Developers Conference)