Jennifer Ward is executive producer of Toronto- and Los Angeles-based Syndicate Music and Sound Design and David Logan Music, which create original music and sound for games. Credits include X-Men: Mutant Academy, Pac-Man World 2 and Twisted Metal 4. Here she reports from the recent Game Developers Conference.

Last year the gaming industry saw hardware and software sales approaching U.S.$10 billion in the U.S. alone. With gaming the new darling of media, the competition has become fiercer to come up with innovations that will capture and maintain gamer interest. With this in mind we headed out to the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, CA, March 4-8, to take a firsthand look at the latest trends.

The conference attracted about 10,000 developers from Japan, France, England, Canada and the U.S., who were joined by programmers, publishers, music composers and artists at more than 300 lectures and roundtable discussions, all in the name of making better games.

Looking at developers, they are the dreamers who work with artists and programmers to create the games of tomorrow. If they don’t already work for a publisher, they attend GDC pitching their ideas in the hopes of obtaining a funding contract to develop their game for market.

Independent developer Adam Bullied of Photon Soup in Vancouver was at the GDC with the concept for his newest game. After more than a dozen meetings with prospective publishers, he was satisfied with his efforts to obtain funding when we met up with him on the convention floor.

‘I’m making a new kind of game with no explosions, no muzzle flashes and no bouncing breasts, and the reaction from the publishers I’m seeing is ‘I want to play this game,” he said.

So how do games makers attract and maintain this level of interest from players? Three trends we gauged at the conference addressed just that, the link among them being new technology giving more choice to the gamers themselves.

Initially, gamers were restricted to playing with a few friends gathered around the PC or console. Now developers are understanding – or creating – a need for players to interact online. This new generation of games is called MMOG – massively multi-player online games. SOCOM, an MMOG from Sony, has sold more than one million units, with 40,000 to 60,000 people playing every day. It is expected that with the realization of new technology, up to 200,000 players will be able to participate in this PlayStation 2 game online. Time will tell whether MMOG will change the way gamers play or be a sideline to traditional gaming.

Mobile gaming, however, is going to be big. Or at least that’s what Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola believe, as they all exhibited their latest forays into gaming via cell phone technology at the GDC. Phones such as the N-Gage, available this fall from Nokia, feature a design similar to a traditional game controller layout, and all feature a full-color screen. With the hardware companies investing heavily in game development, gamers will be able to play wireless.

While much of the music in games is original composition, the latest trend is to license tracks. Gone are the blips, bloops and ‘tin can’ music that were the hallmark of early games. In Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, gamers can change radio stations in the car they drive. The songs licensed were chosen to reflect different musical tastes within the game’s 1980s setting.

One of the hottest games of the year, Splinter Cell, featured licensed music from electronic dance band The Crystal Method. The developers are hoping the music will appeal to the game’s target demographic. The future direction of music in gaming is perhaps illustrated by the Xbox Live experience, in which the gamer can load music of his or her choice into the gaming environment, giving the final musical choice to the player.

And that’s really what the trends in gaming come down to – gamer choice. Whether playing online or on his or her phone, the gamer is the one who will ultimately determine which technologies will stay and which will be left behind.

-www.gdconf.com

-www.syndicatesound.com

-www.davidloganmusic.com