Quick Highlights from GDC 2009

GDC 2009 was awesome. It was an amazing week. For this post, I’ll stick to a quick recap of a few highlights, and I might even get a little sentimental towards the end. GDC, after all, is both a stimulating intellectual and unique emotional experience for many people, myself included.

First, there was the Indie Games Summit, which was awesome. In fact, I’d say that for the first time in my three years of GDC, the summits were even better than the main conference this year.

I attended mostly the IGS, hopping over to Worlds in Motion summit just once, for a great talk about Tiny Adventures, Wizards of the Coast’s Facebook D&D game. IGS was just packed full of useful, candid, fact-filled presentations from Stardock, Hothead Games, thatgamecompany, 2Dboy, and more. (links are to coverage of their talks, if you’d like to read more)

It’s really great to see indie starting to cultivate this really open community and helping each other out more and more. As Ron Carmel (2Dboy) said: “we’re your friends, not your competition!”

As Rasmus Boserup said in his GDC recap, a huge part of what makes GDC great is in the people you meet. But I’d also say that I enjoy seeing how others meet up. It’s great to see such sharp and active minds coming together to share knowledge and support each other as we explore and advance our beloved medium.

A few more highlights: I really enjoyed discussing Scott Macmillan’s game design with Scott and Corvus Elrod, and a Thursday night dinner that Corvus arranged (in addition to the one Darius posted about here) stands out as a highlight as well, even compared to the usually-supreme speaker party that follow it.

This year, I apparently even helped someone realize their own (great) role within the games industry. I made an off-hand remark (to him) about a friend of mine being a (social) “hub” in the games industry, something that I figured was obvious to everyone. Perhaps it was obvious to everyone but him up to that point, because he later told me he’d never quite realized that he’d actually become that much of a social connector.

He also told me that he realized it was always a goal of his to awesome people meet each other, and so he was happy to have become accomplished at that. This reminded me of one of Darius’ networking tips about being useful to other people first, and it really touched me.

It helped me realize just how much being a great “connector” is also a long-term goal of mine, and a skill I think I improved at this year’s GDC. Looking back, some of my best memories of this past GDC were of introducing people to each other and seeing the beginning of what will hopefully be a great friendship come from it. That’s the gift that Darius and Susan Gold gave me when they first helped me make it to GDC two years ago, and it’s a gift I love to pass on.

I’ll post more about the talks themselves next, but I wanted to be sure to start with a sentimental reflection on GDC ‘09. Thanks go to Scott’s wonderful reflection on the “post GDC buzz” on his company blog for that inspiration!