With the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference coming this September 15-17 and registrations now open for the Austin, Texas event - which includes both 'Online Gaming' tracks and a special Worlds In Motion Summit for businesspeople and brands looking to get into virtual worlds, it's time to continue highlighting a few of the already-announced lectures:

- This time round, we can confirm the first - and very neat - keynote for the Worlds In Motion Summit at Austin: Dunder Mifflin Infinity: A Case Study in Using Game Mechanics to Drive Community Behavior. NBC.com's SVP of Digital Development and general manager Stephen Andrade joins Bunchball CEO Rajat Paharia to discuss their success driving user behavior and increasing engagement with Dunder Mifflin Infinity, NBC's a social networking and user-generated content site for fans of TV show The Office. This is the kind of differentiated business-specific content we're providing for WiM that should make it very worthwhile.

- Elsewhere in the Online track at AGDC, Rebel Monkey president and co-founder Nick Fortugno (the co-creator of Diner Dash) is holding a valuable session on design strategies gleaned from successful casual MMOs and how they can be applied to all kinds of online games. The talk, titled What Your Mother and Your Ten-Year Old Can Teach You About MMOs, is intended for anyone looking to expand their online game's reach to less hardcore, less game savvy players and make their games more accessible.

- On the more technical end, NCSoft client technology lead Rusty Koonce will present Postmortem: Deferred Shading in Tabula Rasa as part of the Online track, an in-depth look at deferred shading in an MMO client, using MMORPG Tabula Rasa as a reference. The lecture will cover a wide range of lessons useful to programmers and technical directors, including cost and benefits, implementation details, and performance/scalability/compatibility.

For more information, including a number of other key already debuted lectures that we'll be highlighting weekly here on WorldsInMotion.biz, alongside further new Worlds In Motion Summit/online keynote specifics as they happen, check out the official Austin GDC 2008 website.