What's Wrong with GDC?

The Game Developer's Conference this past week in San Francisco represents something of an anniversary for me. Ten years ago, I attended the Computer Game Developers Conference in Santa Clara, CA. While I had "attended" the previous year, 1995 represents my first official Game Conference, since I had actually paid to attend (rather than skulking about with a borrowed badge), and I have the t-shirt to prove it. Although the 2005 conference was bigger, more polished, and more expensive than ever, I don't necessarily think it is better. In fact, I think GDC is definitely on a downhill slope.

I'm one of those rare managers who believes in sending game developers to conferences. I actually let my team members choose which conferences are important to them and I support them by footing the bill. My theory is that if they really feel it is important, they'll attend anyway, and I buy their loyalty with the cost of the conference. The corollary is that if I don't send them someone else will. One of my requirements for conference attendees is that they provide a post-conference report, documenting what sessions, panels, round-tables, and meetings they attended/participated in, and what value they received. Uniformly over the past several years, these reports have been increasingly critical of GDC.

What's wrong with GDC? There are several ways to answer this in terms of quality of speakers and quality of content (which I will do), but first, I want to turn the question around and say what could be good about GDC. Nearly everyone I've talked to who has attended GDC indicates that the highlight of their conference was meeting someone at another company who performs a similar job and being able to exchange stories of successes and failures in their work. It could have been two animators discussing their character rigs, or programmers sharing how they do code reviews. It could be producers talking about schedule tools, or technical directors talking about middleware solutions. Whatever the details, this sort of networking provides a lot of value to the participants.

The catch is that GDC doesn't really facilitate this level of communication. In fact, the entire GDC environment is somewhat hostile to networking. The obvious forum for meeting one's peers would be in a roundtable discussion; however, the facilities for round-tables this year were abysmal. Instead of hosting each roundtable in a private room, round-tables were organized concurrently in large conference rooms with black curtains dividing one roundtable from another. Each table had a single, hardwired microphone. Attendees in a roundtable were more likely to hear the amplified speaker or moderator from another session than the person a few seats away at the same table. During the conference, when I indicated to someone my plans for attending a particular roundtable, their advice was, "Don't bother; you won't be able to hear anything."

The awards banquet in years past used to be an actual banquet -- the kind with food. The dinner made it feel you got something tangible for the cost of the conference, and provided a great opportunity for mixing, since you were likely to be sitting at a table with seven or eight strangers. The keynotes used to be given by a guy standing at a microphone during the dinner banquet; now we have several keynotes, each a multimedia extravaganza with thumping music, huge projection displays, and outrageous door prizes, but all lacking in substance. I think Greg Costikyan summed it up nicely in his But It's Over Now rant with his quote, "Was YOUR allegiance bought at the price of a television?"

Some of the sessions were quite good. Due to the wisdom of CMP, all the best sessions were held in very small rooms, which meant that unless you arrived twenty minutes early, you didn't get a seat, even if you were lucky enough to get in. Will Wright's talk and the Burning Down the House rant both probably violated half a dozen fire codes.

Some of the session titles sounded promising, but ended up being duds. The most frustrating comments I've heard were from folks who submitted talks that were rejected, and then sat through someone else badly giving a lecture on the same topic:

It turns out that the classes I'd had anticipated the most were a letdown and the ones I was moderately interested in were in were well presented. -- sk

I'm not sure what process CMP uses to pick speakers, but it seems that they give preference to past speakers. This, in my opinion, is partly to blame for the stale nature of GDC's content. Even the most dynamic innovator can't be counted on to provide fresh material year after year. An injection of new speakers with new ideas could only help the conference.

I'm interested in hearing comments from others regarding their GDC experiences. I also confess that I have personal motivation in this, as I'm now involved in organizing session content for the Austin Game Conference, which (as you should know) has an MMP focus.