GDC 2014 (Yes, You Read That Right)
I wrote this for the UbiBlog last year but for whatever reason, it never got posted. You see, I was going to write a pithy GDC post about this year’s show, but then I remembered this and dug it out for nostalgia value, and realized the important bits - not the details, maybe, but the rest - still hold.
So here it is, artifact but still pertinent. The pithy stuff from this year is still coming, I promise. But this will tide you over.
GDC is….
It’s 10 PM in a bar called Soma filled with shouting, cheering game writers. We’ve hit the final round of Write Club, the IGDA Game Writing SIG’s favorite improvisational game writing competition. Three contestants are left, having survived numerous elimination rounds and challenging writing prompts like “Write a mission and villain description for Batman: Suburbs of Arkham”. They are about to take on the last challenge: Write a monologue for the protagonist character in a game about a bloodthirsty cabbage hell-bent on revenge for the murder of his family (working title: Cole’s Law. If you don’t get it, I can’t help you). The crowd is into it. The MC, the estimable Jeremy Bernstein, is into it. The competitors are into it.
And the clock starts, and everyone goes nuts – in a good way.
It’s a booth at Mel’s, the legendary diner around the corner from the Moscone Center. It’s past midnight. People are arguing over who’s going to eat All Of The Fried Things that came on the sampler platter. People are also discussing Marvel’s approach to superheroes as opposed to DC’s, and descriptive passages in novels by Guy Gavriel Kay, and various and sundry other things along those same lines. This is a pack of game writers at play, traveling in a pack.
It’s Room 3016 of Moscone Center West, day 2 of the Game Narrative Summit, middle of the afternoon. Michelle Clough is giving her talk on why we need more sexy men in video games and she is absolutely killing it. The room is in the palm of her hand. It’s a perfect storm of material and speaker and audience and the time being right for people being ready to hear this stuff. Every year at the GNS we have one talk that comes out of nowhere and blows everyone away. Michelle’s is this year’s.
People are cheering. People are laughing. People are taking notes. People are tweeting out choice quotes. It’s magic.
It’s Wednesday morning. I’m sitting in the Ubi lounge when a student pops up. He’s an aspiring game writer. He wants to talk about what he can do to get into the industry, and what he needs to know and do. He showed up because the previous night he met some other Ubi folks – the estimable Maxime Beland and company – who talked to him and pointed him in my direction.
I sit down with him and I talk about building a portfolio. I talk about how to analyze the narrative aspects of games as you play them. I talk about networking. It’s a good chat. Hopefully he walks out of it with more and better intel than he had going in.
And it’s because some pros took a moment to help someone who wasn’t a pro and was a stranger. Community matters.
It’s a dark corner of a dark bar, and the Very Serious Writers are talking. They are talking about narrative structure, distortion and tension. They are talking craft. They are talking about the things that they generally don’t get a chance to talk about most places because most places where you find a writer, you don’t necessarily find writers, comma, plural. So this is a place where game writers find community, where they find the folks who can speak their professional language and understand their professional concerns and offer shared experience with similar problems.
It is a community, one that gathers at rare moments like the Game Narrative Summit. At those moments, it is a pleasure and an honor to be part of that crowd, to be among the talented folks working on this particular craft within game development and driving to make it better. To be among professional peers, folks whom I can hopefully offer something to and folks I can learn from, and folks I can sit down and bullshit with.
It’s memories.
Years ago, at the first Game Narrative Summit (it was the Game Writers’ Conference then), I walked into the room for the first session, ahead of Marc Laidlaw’s opening talk. There were roughly 200 people seated in that room – students and senior developers, pros and dreamers, journeymen and superstars. And so help me, my first thought was “I’m not alone.”
True story: I’ve talked to at least 50 people who were in the room for that moment. And every single one of them had the same thought walking through that door.
It’s running into old friends in the middle of the street and finding out what ridiculously cool things they’re working on. It’s watching someone who’s just rocked a room for the first time realizing that people really are interested in what they have to say. It’s random encounters in hallways with brilliant people that turn into fascinating discussions that turn into “holy crap, we’ve been talking for an hour and now I need to go write this down”. It’s wrapping up a session and having folks come up to you want to continue the discussion. It’s people expressing genuine thanks that they learned something in a session, that something there was useful or resonant to them. It’s being the dumbest guy in the room, and being glad to be the dumbest guy in the room because that means learning from everyone else there. It means remembering to break in the new sneakers long before the show, because there’s going to be miles and miles of walking. It’s meeting up with coworkers from another studio and being able to suggest a good restaurant when they ask. It’s introducing one brilliant friend to another brilliant friend who really ought to know each other, and getting the hell out of the way while they say brilliant things to one another, brilliantly.
And then, it’s going back the next day and doing it all over again.
