Raph’s Website » Thoughts on GDC

Thoughts on GDC

March 10th, 2007 (Visited 3252 times) Tags:

Here I am in Austin now, right across the street from the Convention Center where the mob scene that is SXSW plays out. I am totally exhausted. I went over to registration, and they were out of the badge holders so they could give me the right badge. They said they could give me one of the other sorts, but I wouldn’t have access to any parties tonight. I doubt I will be conscious for more than another two hours, so I just told them I’d come by in the morning for the real badge…

Besides, I feel guilty about not having posted the slides for the Game Meets Web talk yet. So I should stay in and do that!

In the meantime, my thoughts on GDC are as follows:

Too big, somehow. Two halls, with keynotes going to a third hall (!). Last time it was in downtown San Francisco, it was just West Hall. The spread out nature of it meant that it was harder to bump into folks, harder to coordinate meeting up, and just less personal. The lack of a central watering hole like the Fairmont was in San Jose was an issue as well.
Too E3ish. What the hell were E3 booths doing on the expo floor? Argh! I suppose they had nothing else they could do with them… And actually, there were two expo floors. But seriously, the fact that the GameSpy and GameSpot coverage is easily half demos, videos of games, and the like is a bad thing. GDC shouldn’t be about that sort of glitz. I realize that with no E3, this was where the marketing and PR folks had to go, but… bleah. When I saw the giant weird constructed booths sitting in the middle of the expo floor, I winced. And why was there loud pulsing music going on the expo floor? The one time I ever saw booth babes at GDC, they were widely derided by everyone… so I worry.
Small is big was a common theme: lots of talk about indie stuff, casual stuff, serious game stuff, DS stuff, etc.
Online was everywhere, which is what you would expect at this point — even before the keynote announcement of PS3 Home.
Suits looking for online plays were also everywhere. A ton of VCs, hedge fund managers, private equity folks, media conglomerate people — I saw “mergers and acquisition” on at least three random badges throughout the show. There were what seemed like an equal number of online startups looking to connect with these people.
Too many parties. One night, I was scheduled to be in five places at once.

For us, the show went great. From a catch-up-with-people point of view, though, it was hard connecting, so it wasn’t nearly as satisfying in some ways.

BTW, nice interview of Mark Jacobs and coverage of the MMO Past Present and Future panel over at VirginWorlds. I look forward to their coverage of my lecture — I bumped into them on the last day right as the show was ending.

OK, so now the question is, stay downtown for dinner, or wander off to Rudy’s?

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Return of the Dragon [CHAT] thread wrote on March 10th, 2007 at 8:03 pm:

[...] Hey Blaze, a developer that agrees with you on the GDC.http://www.raphkoster.com/2007/03/10/thoughts-on-gdc/ [...]

Psychochild’s Blog wrote on March 11th, 2007 at 2:40 pm:

it was “too E3ish”, I think it would be good to think about what goes into a good conference. I’ll post my ideas a bit later. As some know, I’ve helped to put together a few of the MUD-Dev conferences, so I have some thoughts on this matter.

Psychochild’s Blog » Weekend Design Challenge: Conferences wrote on March 13th, 2007 at 2:23 am:

[...] Given my thoughts on the GDC, and the impressions of other people (particularly Raph’s lament that it was “too E3ish”, I think it would be good to think about what goes into a good conference. I’ll post my ideas a [...]

...on pampers, programming & pitching manure wrote on March 20th, 2007 at 7:18 am:

for low-carb folk. “You sit at a table. A river of unending charbroiled meats approaches. You have a green and red wheel, a cocktail, and a fried plantain.” Sounds like it should be a snippet from Kingdom of Loathing. Thoughts on GDC Overall, Raph sums it up nicely, and I agree with his points.The “infusion of E3″ that happened came in three forms. (1) E3-esque booths and product exhibits (I have to wonder whether some people really think through WHY they are exhibiting at a show and considering who their

Sulka.net wrote on March 20th, 2007 at 2:25 pm:

GDC Post Mortem GDC reports I found interesting: Raph Koster, Joi Ito, Nabeel Hyatt, Matt Mihaly and Daniel James from OOO. Web 2.0, microtransactions, casual games, virtual worlds are surfing the trend right now. The focus on talks seemed to be much more on simpler online games than massive box titles. There

Cuppycake said on March 10th, 2007 at 6:22 pm:

Too many parties? That is blasphemy =P

Allen Sligar said on March 11th, 2007 at 9:27 am:

This was my first GDC, and I dont have anything to compare it to, it was pretty overwhelming, I just wish I’d had fewer meetings and been able to get to more talks/sessions.

I do know that:
1. My feet hurt after day 2 from lots of walking
2. There may have been a lot of parties but they were fun (CCP 4tw)

As for suits, I’m sure you might have noticed more of them because they were probably tripping over themselves to get your attention. Not so with us small fries OTOH being off the radar has it’s advantages

My only complaint was that a few of the companies might want to re-evaluate thier staffing policies for their booths, sending anti-social people or people uninterested in promoting their company, badly informed staff, or worse in one case a really confrontational marketing guy, does not engender a whole lot of excitement for their product at minimum.

Tess said on March 11th, 2007 at 10:01 am:

Wow, that sounds pretty much exactly the way I imagined. I’ve been leery of GDC ever since I went to the previous one in San Francisco. It didn’t feel like GDC at all, to me. That’s not to say that it can’t be in other locations and still feel like GDC. The first one I ever went to was the one in Long Beach. But it sort of used to feel like a family reunion to me, and when I went to the one in 2005, it felt like I’d shown up to the wrong family’s reunion.

Add to it E3 tackiness and… bleh.

I dunno. I’ll probably be back, someday, but right now, it’s just lost some of its appeal.

dsutton said on March 11th, 2007 at 8:50 pm:

Too E3ish. What the hell were E3 booths doing on the expo floor?

I felt the same way. In fact, in my SGS presentation to my school back in November, bullet point 3 on slide 23 is “GDC: E3’s demise foretelling the future?” I know I’m not in the game dev circle, yet, but the content from most of the sessions I attended at this GDC seemed pretty cosmetic at best.

I expect more fractures in GDC … as our medium expands and encompasses broader issues, the focal point of the shards will narrow. If GDC follows in E3’s footsteps, so be it. We’ll find other conferences to converge on, other sessions to attend, and other parties to attend. Hopefully, the future conventions will have like parties in the same room

Prokofy Neva said on March 12th, 2007 at 9:35 pm:

You know, my first thought reading your post was this: you’re getting too old for this game conference stuff. I mean, it’s a young man’s game, perhaps, milling around with lots of other geeky dudes chasing IT jobs and opportunities. You already all that. So maybe there’s no value-add. I didn’t see an awful lot of sense come out of it, looking from a distance but some notes and themes were usefully reverberating especially on 3pointd.com

Well, I wasn’t there obviously, but I think re: your point “harder to coordinate meeting up” — it’s just you aren’t on Twitter, Raph, that’s all. That’s how they were all meeting up and coordinating by going on Twitter, which is kind of this giant free-floating geopositional stream which you can turn on full blast or trickle depending on how much of it you want.

It actually surprisingly isn’t the time suck you imagine, it’s more of a kind of intersticial metaversal filler.

I mean, if you stick to the protocol there and just post what you’re doing or a witty mot or link now and then and use it to tip people and fill up time you’re in a waiting room or in a cab or something anyway, it’s useful. Plus a lot of the kewl kids are on it so you can stampede after the swarm, I guess.

Raph said on March 12th, 2007 at 9:43 pm:

Heh, funny.

I don’t know ANYONE who uses Twitter except for Webby geeks. Here at SXSW everyone is using it. At GDC, nobody was using it. I have gotten into multiple debates about the utility and desirability of it while here.

Thoughts on GDC

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