Today, registration was opened for the 2008 Game Developers Conference. Like GDC 2007, the annual networking and information-sharing event will again take place at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California. However, event organizers the CMP Group will hold this year's conference from February 18 to 22, several weeks earlier than the confab's traditional mid-to-late-March time slot.

　　GDC 08 will feature two new single-topic tracks: the Game Outsourcing Summit, which debuted as a stand-alone conference last year in Los Angeles, as well as the Worlds in Motion Summit, which will deal with "the intersection between games and online worlds."

　　Returning to this year's GDC will be the Serious Games Summit, the Independent Games Summit, the Casual Games Summit, and GDC Mobile. CMP also said it has issued its call for tech-minded dissertations later than normal so that topics covered will be as current as possible.

　　Community will also play a larger role at this year's conference. In early November, event organizers will be launching myGDC, a social-networking initiative built into the conference's Web site. The myGDC initiative will let conferencegoers create user profiles that can used for networking purposes leading up to and beyond this year's show.

　　The GDC 2008 Web site has more event details and registration information.