We don't know about you but we sure love Tabula Rasa logos. It's pretty cool to befuddle your non-TR gaming friends with these, they look so professional. As for now the Benefactor Stone project uncovers two new logos. SI Research Labs have received and processed these.

The first one appears to be a logo for "location". It looks like a sniper gun's cross hairs. It's a circular shape divided by a cross that has a dot in the middle. The next logo appears to be four squares arranged in a table, three of which has a dot in the center with the upper right hand square having no dot inside. It's a logo that means "most / many"

These logos are meant to interest would-be TR enthusiasts and fan interaction. If you're wondering who's to be credited with the nice designs of these logos, it's game designer Richard Garriott. There are more than a hundred of these logos, the complete set of which will be released as soon as TR launches - so watch out.

There's been talk of the upcoming E3 being downsized by the just-held Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007. Reasons vary: this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo will be an invitation-only event, and the GDC saw a 32 percent rise of attendance.

We've all witnessed so much hype for this year's GDC, all with good reason. The GDC people worked hard to bring out a good show; GDC boss Jamil Moledina and his crew brought a good load of dealmaking, press conferences and industry parties to go around in the event.  It also helped that they were able to secure the interesting hands-on hardware workshops with Microsoft and Intel, as well as hotshot keynote speakers such as Shigeru Miyamoto, Phil Harrison and Cliff Bleszinkski.

Said GDC boss Moledina:

The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Our alumni attendees uniformly felt it was the best GDC they've attended in recent years, citing the high quality and relevance of sessions, while newcomers were saying it was the best event in the game industry where they made connections and deals with all the key people they now had access to.

More than 16,300 people and 260 exhibitors attended this year's GDC, seeing a rise of 30 and 32 percent, respectively. Everybody's expecting an even bigger attendance at next year's GDC, but as Moledina cites, it's not the size of the event, but the quality that matters. This may exactly be why the usual E3 people are moving to the GDC.

A new simulation produced by the partnership of WILL Interactive, Inc. and Washington Hospital Center will prove that gaming is not only for leisure, but also for learning. It's called Anatomy of Care, a Virtual Experience Immersive Learning Simulation (VEILS), that allows its players to immerse themselves on the critical duty of customer care for hospital staff.

Not actually a game but a Web-based training program, Anatomy of Care allows learners to choose between five characters to role play (doctor, nurse, clerical, patient transporter and environmental service worker) at a fictional metropolitan hospital. They are then presented with stressful true-to-life scenarios, making the tough decisions that go with running a hospital.

Designed to educate hospital staff, this simulation promotes compassion, sensitive interpersonal dealings and clarity of values to its users. If this hospital simulation is anything like the ones we love, such as Theme Hospital or Trauma Center, we bet Anatomy of Care will be just as enjoyable as it is educational.

As for its makers, WILL Interactive, Inc. has already made VEILS being used by millions of military personnel, middle school, high school and college students. Washington Hospital Center is one of the largest top hospitals in the United States.

Gamasutra went in-depth with the "Queen Bee" of alternate reality games (ARG), Jane McGonigal. Named by MIT as one of the world's top innovators under age 35, Jane talks about collective intelligence, ARGs and the future of gaming.

Jane has a degree in performance studies. She recently finished her PhD and left her job as a game designer at 42 Entertainment, realizing that research was her true passion. Performance studies is a field that sees performance as both an object of study and as a method of analysis. Jane's background on this field lead her to "enspirit a place" in her games; to make them understanding and meaningful to the gamers.

The thing about games, Jane says, is that there are different norms everywhere. Gameplay isn't the right answer in all situations. There's a limit to gaming and gaming is not a completely inclusive mode of living. This is what the experience of "enspiriting" taught Jane.

Jane also talked of collective intelligence, an intelligence that comes out from a collaboration of many individuals, and seemingly has a mind of its own. In MMOs, Jane thinks that collective intelligence fits into the idea of people playing alone, together with other people. The real social interaction that happens on MMOs isn't interacting with other players; but inhabiting the space together.

Jane's new ARG, World Without Oil, starting April 30th, will make the players use any means necessary to drive the story, test the limits, and decide whatever the hell will happen to the game. Sound interesting isn't it? We'll see later how the game will turn out, before the world really runs out of oil...

Warhammer Online is an upcoming MMOG being developed by Electronic Arts Mythic. The game centers around the conflict between two factions, Order and Destruction. The new images that we have right now further elaborate on the fact that the world of Warhammer is always at war. Check out those beasts.

Should a player choose to play in the path of Chaos, they may become a Marauder, a Chaos Knight, Zealots, and Magus Sorcerers. The Empire, meanwhile, which is the faction of Order, has the following career options: Witch Hunter, Bright Wizards of Fire Magic, Warrior Priest of Sigmar, and Knight of the Blazing Sun. Here are some concept art from the game:

 

 More of them concept art after the jump!

If you play so much World of Warcraft, and if you blog about it, chances are those folks behind the game will recognize you. An avid WoW player, Tobold, decided to do something funny in his blog one day. He posted about pink orcs and leper gnomes to be available in a second expansion of the MMOG. There is no second expansion and will never be any pink orcs (or at least we think). Most of his blog readers got the joke, but some actually believed it.

Anyway, Blizzard decided to post his blog at the community news bulletin. We have no idea why, but we guess it's Blizzard's way of saying that they got the joke and they think it's funny.

Tobold calls his WoW Second Expansion, The Freezing Jihad (TFJ), and according to him, it's coming January of next year. Tobold's brush with fame could serve as a sort of inspiration. Pink orcs may not be so bad... Just click on our image to read it better. You could also check out the details of Tobold's very own WoW Second Expansion in the via link below.

The Game Musketeers caught up with April Burba, Tabula Rasa's community Manager, whom everybody knows as CuppaJo. The Texas-girl shared some insights on Tabula Rasa, discussing the vision that NCSoft wants to impart with their sci-fi MMOG.

Things are picking up speed, said CuppaJo, when asked about the development of TR and its shipment Fall of this year. People have been wondering what's been taking the TR people so long with the development, but CuppaJo says that they've only started working on the current version of the game for 3 years, an average in MMOG development.

When asked about how TR will handle bypassing the pitfalls of other non-successful first-person shooter MMOG's, the community Manager responds by saying that TR is not really an FPS MMOG but rather, more of an action RPG. Playing TR is a more visceral experience, she says, and it will cater to the MMORPG purist because it's still an RPG, only less boring.

According to her, the team feels like they've reached the last days of the first evolution of MMOs, embarking on a new evolution playing the game, not the interface. Some innovations that they'd like to have to get sci-fi MMOG's to be more successful are their Character Cloning system and Ethical Parables.

If CuppaJo could change anything about TR, she says that it'll be to add a global voice announcement system for events and server announcement - so we'd look forward to that. In the meantime, CuppaJo leaves an endnote that Closed Beta invites are going to be sent out in several weeks.

Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2007 attendees benefitted from the talk of Jim Charne, an attorney experienced in the video games industry. Charne spoke at length about how video games developers will be able to negotiate well on their contracts with publishers.

Charne made sure to advise game developers to define what constitutes a material breach. He spoke about solutions to breaches being simple and existing as the contract. Knowing what material breaches are would make everything simpler, and would make simple material breaches easy to cure.

Curing breaches, however, start as favorable to the publisher, but the developers are advised to talk this down, and to make these as fair to the developers as possible. The right to terminate for convenience is unique in the games industry. Being extremely disruptive to the developers, they must establish ways to soften these down, that developers don't fall victim to a terminate for convenience being treated as a terminate for cause.

Charne also warned of turn around, that happens whenever a game is dropped by one publisher and picked up by another. Many other things can get in the way of small game developers being paid, but Charne said that understanding and wording contracts in simple language will help a lot. All in all, the talk proved to be informative and helpful to game developers, about their ways of dealing with game publishers in the gaming industry.

PC World, a global computer magazine, has recently named some of the most influential people on the internet. Net heads, here's the top five of a list of those persons who move and shake the internet; we've arranged them from the fifth to the first for emphasis.

5. Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia - Admit it:  whatever piece of information that you get/cite, trivial or otherwise, often  comes from Wikipedia. It's even been cited in more than 100 US court decisions since
2004.

 4. Mike Morhaime, President of Blizzard Entertainment - Some say that there are only two MMO's: WoW, and everything else. Eight million people (and still counting) plus a chance to obtain the Blade of Eternal Justice put this guy at number 4.

3. Bram Cohen, Co founder of BitTorrent - This math and programming whiz kid put up BitTorrent, a way to download large files (like movies) by sharing the burden across hardware and bandwidth.

2. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple -  DRM-free music and internet browsing through iPhone puts him on top - again.

1. Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, Executives of Google - The most trafficked site on the internet is bound to influence internet users the most.

Everybody looks for the freebies in any major event or conference. Since the Game Developers Conference is one cool event, it's not surprising if they dished out cool satchel of goodies to its delegates, right? Check out what they handed out at the GDC'07. There's a black canvass bag filled to the brim with brochures and fliers that are glossy, colored and surely informative. There's this cool mat of chewing gum from Gamedev and what we love the most: a tiny package of jelly beans from 1UP. Nothing beats sucking on these available-only-at-the-GDC candies!

Currently ongoing (until March 9), the Game Developers Conference is being held in San Francisco. It's an annual gathering of video game makers and gaming enthusiasts that'll leave the average gamer happy with all of the gaming news to be had. Having seen the goodie bags, we wonder if they'll be giving out cooler sweets next year? We'll keep you posted for more news as they come. In the meantime, here are some photos:

See more photos after the jump!