This year, starting at 3pm we'll have presentations by Microsoft about developing for the Windows Phone (and some spiffy giveaways at the end of the weekend if you choose make a Windows Phone game). 

Thanks to generous sponsorship by Next Century, there's no registration fee and food will be provided all weekend. However, you DO need to sign up in advance, just log into globalgamejam.org and select UMBC as your site.

UMBC has been a Global Game Jam site since the very beginning, four years ago. Many Global Game Jam sites have to charge a registration fee, but thanks to the continued support by Columbia, MD-based Next Century Corporation, we are able to be totally free!  It is not necessary to be a UMBC student to participate at the UMBC site, but we are limited to the first 40 participants, so register now at globalgamejam.org.

There are more details at gaim.umbc.edu/global-game-jam, including site hours, what to expect, and just what this Game Jam thing is anyway. Even if you don't participate, you can follow along with twitter #ggj12 and #umbcggj, and after the event is over, find our games on the Global Game Jam web site.

Their "2011 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry" report has some other really interesting data as well. The average game player's age is 37. Game players do skew male, but not as much stereotypes might make you think (58/42), and for frequent game purchasers, it's almost even (52/48). Also, the top selling console category is action (21.7%), but for PC games it's strategy (33.6%). There's lots more in there (mostly graphs and 40-point numbers, so pretty easy reading). 

This is work started by Dr. Marc Olano (director of the UMBC Computer Science game development track) while on sabbatical at Firaxis, and being continued by graduate student Wesley Griffin for his PhD dissertation. The paper was written by Dr. Olano, Dan Baker, Wesley Griffin, and Firaxis graphics programmer (and UMBC graduate) Joshua Barczak. It details how Civilization V can use the newest graphics cards to reduce the size of data that it stores and speed the transition between scenes in the game.

One of the Civilization V "benchmark modes" also runs the algorithm described in this paper. This benchmark has been used by several graphics industry reporters to compare the computational capabilities of different graphics cards.