Patrick Shaw takes in a pair of social gaming panels--Building Virtual Worlds and The State of Social Gaming.

In a GDC session held earlier today, Sulka Haro, lead concept designer of social networking website Habbo Hotel, led a discussion on "what virtual worlds can learn from social games." Habbo Hotel, which Haro described as a pixilated virtual world where teenagers can hang out and interact with others using their 8-bit avatar, has seen tremendous success and growth since its inception in 2000.

"One of the major ingredients for social games success is making the process of finding friends to connect with incredibly easy,"Haro said. "This is really important and all social game developers should be doing this. Other ingredients include enabling meaningful parallel play and solving any distribution problems that you have, which is a problem for many developers."

In a GDC presentation on social games, Inside Facebook editor Justin Smith gave an overview of the current state of social gaming and discussed how developers can take full advantage of "what works and what doesn't" when creating games for Facebook and other social game platforms. Facebook recently launched something called Facebook Connect, a set of APIs for developers to bring Facebook to any website, platform and mobile device, which Smith called a "game changer" for the social media giant. He cited Facebook Connect as one of the examples of how it's a rapidly evolving platform. Smith later said that although developers have "experimented" with social games on Twitter, he believes "it is not a social game platform" and he doesn't see this changing anytime in the near future either.

Last, but not least, Dave Rudden took in a pair of sessions related to portable games--5TH Cell: From Mobile to Handheld & Beyond and Call of Duty: World at War Zombies - iPhone Postmortem

The title of Scribblenauts developer 5TH Cell's session seemed to hint at more info on the recently revealed sequel to last year's best DS game, but unfortunately, new details were scarce. The speech did, however, provide some great insight into the game's popularity, as Scribblenauts Producer Caleb Arseneaux revealed the game's toolset and methods of launching the title.

Arseneaux showed off the two primary tools that fueled Scribblenauts. The first was "Tileforge," a tool that started as a map creation system in previous 5TH Cell titles, but has now evolved into a tool that can aid AI scripting. More impressive looking was "Objectnaut," the tool that allowed the developers to set the unique properties for every one of the tens of thousands of objects in Scribblenauts. Of course, we got to see a picture of Cthulu created within the Objecnaut.