A new contest was announced by Sierra recently. The contest is called "The Official Map Making Contest." A stretch of intense research into the "Official Map Making Contest" has lead me to the discovery that the map making contest is for the game World In Conflict.

If you are a fan of the popular W.W 3 game, into making maps, or want to enter the contest just for no reason at all, you can do so over here, at the official Official Map Making Contest's Website website.

NVIDIA has thrown some prizes into the mix: the grand prize is 1000 clams, a fancy new video card (a 8800 GT I believe), and a good chance of seeing your map in a future World In Conflict game, or expansion pack. There are also some prizes for the chumps who win in the following categories: Best use of DX10, Best Assault Map, Best, Domination Map, Best Tug of War Map.

I believe the comma after "best" is a typo -- it's not really its own category. Furthermore, as for the "Best use of DX10" category, for those of you that have been following the contest, it was previously called the "Best Map That Slows Down Your Framerates, Yet Does Not Add Any Better Visual Effects" category (evidence.)

If you want to get into the wacky world of game design, you could do worse than win a contest like this. So hop to it.

(Oh yeah: and the map editor is free. So you don't even need the game to make the map. Though this may make the whole 'design' phase somewhat tricker.)