I’ve been to GDC a couple of times in the past, always returning to reality overflowing with ideas, batteries recharged.
But this year’s was something special.
Some lucky confluence of my own experiences, where my head’s at, the people in attendance, the conference itself–I don’t know–came together to give me a GDC I’ll never forget. That sounds like something out of a John Hughes film, but I’m serious.
Funny thing is that this year, it wasn’t even the talks. I attended half a dozen or so over the week in between my volunteer responsibilities, and they were great. I left them all with lots of takeaways for my current gig at PopCap, some of which I’m putting into practice already. But my God, the conversations. Sunup to sundown, with restless hostel sleep that kept my brain from processing it all before it was time to do it again.
Each day began with a familiar, early-rising ritual: the 7AM walk through the urine-soaked, scaffold-strewn jungle that is SoMa to Sightglass and a morning roundtable with the Game Audio Podcast. (Side note: how the hell is that poverty line so distinctly drawn and right below a park, two shopping centers and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts?) This initiative was fully on the rails last year, packed each morning and full of amazing discussion. This year’s, though. I mean, they may as well start selling Sightglass Track passes to the conference for all the folks that were showing up daily. I want to say we were running around 40-50 bleary-eyed sound designers, programmers and audio-curious every single morning. And yet, the whole thing–this interacting with the broader game audio community–still feels intimate, like it’s really ours. The companion carousel lunch hour’s the same way: a free-flowing group of game audio all-stars swapping cards and stories every day. No “X years AAA development” nor shipped titles necessary.
I don’t think I’m the only one who felt this way. A scrape of last week’s activity on the #GameAudioGDC hashtag reveals a lot of sentimentality and gratitude, held up as maybe the most important takeaway from this year’s conference.
So I’ll get to digging into some of my talks, thoughts and learnings in a later post, but wanted to start the snowball rolling with a final round of Internet thanks towards the entire game audio community for being so fucking rad. Not four years ago, this site was a desperate chronicling of me and my student exercises. I wanted very badly to belong to the conversation but was sharply aware of how little I knew, how I hadn’t “broken in” yet. I wore this attitude on my sleeve a lot of the time, and it’s made my small steps into this career really taxing at times. Turns out I needn’t have felt that way. We’re all in it–from the hobbyist, the still-enrolled and the just-getting-started to the AAA sound designer and audio director. There’s room around the Sightglass table for all sorts. We’re fortunate to have that.
As @mattesque put it on this week’s Bleeps and Bloops, “at some point game audio got to the point where people felt like they could win without other people losing.”
Cheers to that.
My favourite thing about the games industry is the people.
— Joe (@nearlyoutside) March 7, 2015
The theme of this year's GDC. Strengthening Connections.
— Bridge (@rbridgett) March 7, 2015
So proud of the #GameAudioGDC community. So many amazingly talented people sharing knowledge freely. This is the extacy of communication.
— lostchocolatelab (@lostlab) March 6, 2015
#GameAudioGDC @gameaudiopodcst pic.twitter.com/13FUEDo9R3
— lostchocolatelab (@lostlab) March 4, 2015
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