Back from GDC
I got back from GDC on Friday morning. On the whole, I had a great trip. I stayed with friends from my old studio and got a chance to catch up on various news about mutual friends and colleagues, as well as watch them hatch their newest initiative in their ongoing quest for world domination, in the form of a really cool company making videogames the right way. Their game really was the buzz of the Game Connection event, so things are looking good.
GDC is a lot less frantic and loud than E3, but it's still pretty silly. It's a cross between a trade expo and a swap meet, with scores of studios, publishers, and other assorted industry types hawking their wares or looking to hire the next exploitable genius. So I did my best to play along, hawking my wares as an exploitable genius. The response was pretty positive, with most of the major studios or publishers in the Puget Sound region expressing interest in my resume and asking for further info. We'll see what happens there. I also got a chance to talk with the book publishers interested in my book on independent game dev, and we ironed out some of their concerns about content and approach. They also seem okay with the possibility that the book might take longer to write if I get a job in the industry again.
In the evenings, I spent a lot of time at parties sponsored by various game companies, drinking a lot of booze paid for by somebody else. The point of these occasions, I suppose, is to make networking connections with other people in the industry, which I tried to do as much as possible. But mostly, I ended up meeting and catching up with people I used to work with. It was an interesting experience, coming so quickly on the heels of the SCMS film and media studies conference. In academia, the word "networking" causes people to make the Mr. Yuk face and sniff comments like "careerist" and "superficial." Almost as if to prove that they are not motivated by career concerns but by their love of the higher cause of knowledge, academics seem to go out of their way to be rude, combative, and dismissive of each other, particularly if their interactors are in the same field of study. Conversely, every person I met at GDC was making an effort to be affable and interested. Even people who have an active reason not to like me very much. Granted, this friendliness was usually motivated by professional interest, but at the end of the day, given the choice between people acting like a-holes in order to prove how intellectually serious they are and people acting like your best friend because they want to see if you can make them money somehow... Actually, neither of those options sounds all that great when expressed in those terms. Hmm. Well, at least the GDC parties usually had free alcohol.
GDC is a lot less frantic and loud than E3, but it's still pretty silly. It's a cross between a trade expo and a swap meet, with scores of studios, publishers, and other assorted industry types hawking their wares or looking to hire the next exploitable genius. So I did my best to play along, hawking my wares as an exploitable genius. The response was pretty positive, with most of the major studios or publishers in the Puget Sound region expressing interest in my resume and asking for further info. We'll see what happens there. I also got a chance to talk with the book publishers interested in my book on independent game dev, and we ironed out some of their concerns about content and approach. They also seem okay with the possibility that the book might take longer to write if I get a job in the industry again.
In the evenings, I spent a lot of time at parties sponsored by various game companies, drinking a lot of booze paid for by somebody else. The point of these occasions, I suppose, is to make networking connections with other people in the industry, which I tried to do as much as possible. But mostly, I ended up meeting and catching up with people I used to work with. It was an interesting experience, coming so quickly on the heels of the SCMS film and media studies conference. In academia, the word "networking" causes people to make the Mr. Yuk face and sniff comments like "careerist" and "superficial." Almost as if to prove that they are not motivated by career concerns but by their love of the higher cause of knowledge, academics seem to go out of their way to be rude, combative, and dismissive of each other, particularly if their interactors are in the same field of study. Conversely, every person I met at GDC was making an effort to be affable and interested. Even people who have an active reason not to like me very much. Granted, this friendliness was usually motivated by professional interest, but at the end of the day, given the choice between people acting like a-holes in order to prove how intellectually serious they are and people acting like your best friend because they want to see if you can make them money somehow... Actually, neither of those options sounds all that great when expressed in those terms. Hmm. Well, at least the GDC parties usually had free alcohol.
posted by L&D at
9:08 AM
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