Macguffin Games

The Post-GDC Buzz

I just flew back from GDC.  And boy, are my arms tired.

Sadly, my notebook is winging its way back to me from San Francisco via express mail.  I left it in Darius Kazemi’s satchel bag, and he’s been nice enough to send it back to me.  So, in lieu of in-depth discussion of the various talks I went to, I’m just going to talk about the effect GDC always seems to have on me – this year more so than ever before.  Hopefully I can get some discussion on the talks up when my notebook arrives.

Including last week, I’ve now been to GDC three times in my six year games career.  Every time I go, the conference is this cuisinart of talks, parties, old friends, new friends, business opportunities, learning, and excitement.  And even though I come back completely exhausted (and often on the verge of getting sick), I always find myself incredibly psyched about this medium and its possibilities.

Each time I’ve been to the conference before now, I’ve been a little more worldly about the games industry and a little less fanboy about my idols.  That isn’t necessarily bad – it’s harder to operate as an independent with big stars in your eyes.  But either way, GDC always leaves me with this amazingly uplifted feeling.  This year, I finally put my finger on exactly what it is.  Chris at The Artful Gamer has a post that captures it from his perspective – for him, GDC completely unearths that unrestrained, yammering lover of games that is buried in him, and lets it revel – free from constraint and embarrassment.

For me, that is completely true – but it also goes a step past there.  After this past week, I think I finally understand exactly what the appeal is.

On Thursday or so, my friend Darren Torpey and I were chilling in the suite for a short respite.  Somehow he got me onto the topic of why I had decided to go indie.  He was curious, I think, what finally causes someone to toss security away and go for something like this.

There are a lot of reasons I’m doing this, and we talked about them.  Proving something to myself, finding my own limits, testing how far I can go – all those personal motivations are in there.  But there was another part to it, and it links back directly to what I get out of GDC every year.

Every time I come to GDC, I am completely submerged in a community of people whose mission is to push, pull, and claw games forward into actualizing their potential.  If I stop to think about it, every person I’ve ever met there is pushing forward in some way.  Sometimes it’s new and better AAA games, an iteration forward for a $15 million title.  Sometimes it’s a crazy indie that is trying to bring their personal vision of the perfect game to life.  Even Chris Crawford, as famously bitter as he can be, is still looking forward, railing and working to make games (or stories, in his case) into what they can become.

I’ve seen the other side of it.  After college I worked for a bit at Bugle Boy Jeans – where all the executives had this aimless, lost look about them and the whole place felt like it fell out out Brazil.  When you can contrast to something like that, you know damn well that we’re not in that boat.

So – what does GDC give to me?  The most important thing it does for me is renew that bond of community and shared purpose with people who care about games.  We’re on a mission.  I’m on a mission.  It’s one step forward at a time, failures and pitfalls along the way – but forward we will go.  Without getting too sappy about the whole thing, that sense of renewal is what keeps me coming back year after year, despite the crazy cost of the thing, the lost week of work time, and the awful jetlag.  And I’m sure I’ll be there again next year, as well.

We’re making progress on that mission, although sometimes it is hard to see.  Eventually we’ll fill out the whole ecosystem with every bizzare game the human mind can conceive – everything from the arthouse games, hardcore old-school games, mature sex games, big-budget blockbusters – and we’ll run the gamut of human experience and emotion.  I’ve got no idea what I’ll do at that point, if I’m even around… but I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.

Tags: Game Development, GDC, indie