One of the most awesome and sometimes sadly under-reported things about that Game Developers Conference thing that we help organize is the massive, multiplayer, offline game that goes along with it - and has been run for many years now.

Huh? Game, you might say? As the folks from New York-based casual/alt.developer Gamelab (Diner Dash) explain in their postmortem of last year's 'Gangs Of GDC': "For the last six years Gamelab... has made a conference-wide game to be played during the GDC." (Some more, including Confquest and Pantheon, are listed on Gamelab's own site.)

In any case, there's info about this year's game, Destroy All Developers on the official GDC site, we just spotted, and it sounds like a blast: "A secret war rages beneath the surface of the game industry. The war between programmers and producers, between game designers and suits, between artists and sound designers. Only one discipline can survive."

Oh yeah? "At the 2008 Game Developers Conference, this war will reach its final conclusion. In DESTROY ALL DEVELOPERS, you will take on secret missions, infiltrating the GDC to gather information on your fellow developers. Collect business cards from unsuspecting conference attendees, work with your teammates, and watch your back." So if you have some time while you're at the conference in a couple of weeks, play along and see if you can "become an assassin" and "collect the business cards of particular players for extra points." Haw, I'll never give out my card in safety again!