If you can measure the importance of an industry by the number of trade shows and events it has, then the video game industry is definitely on the rise. In the United States, there's Game Developer's Conference (GDC) in San Jose next week, and then Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles in May. The former is a developer-centric event, and the second is more for publishers. In the midst of those add a wide range of small academic events (tracked by Gonzalo).

Today and tomorrow there is another entry in the range of developer/publisher events, a "summit," the second annual D.I.C.E. from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, hosted at the hipish Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. GDC is a sprawling geekfest, I guess the people behind DICE felt there might be some draw from a celebrity-game-designer driven discussion of broad game design concepts minus programming. D.I.C.E. is single-track, meaning there's only one speaker at a time. Add a limited attendee pool, no sub-800$ registration, a strong selection of luminary designers, and it's likely an entertaining, perhaps enlightening, if slightly endogamous chance to develop thinking about games.