Back from GDC
Is GDC - the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco - worth it anymore? I truly cannot say. I was there last week and the stress of it didn't kill me dead, which is awesome. I was glad to see many people I haven't seen in years and congratulate them on their various victories and accomplishments! That was fun. I valued that time a lot!
I didn't have a pass and didn't feel like I needed one. I was so focused on talking to people in the park or doing Work Stuff that I did not really have any time to think about talks or the show floor. If I know you extremely well, like talk-every-week well, then I knew whether you were doing a talk and checked up to see how it went for you. If I did not know you that closely, I did not do those things. I'm sorry! I am not looking habitually at Bluesky. I had to ask you what was going on in your life because I literally did not know.
I haven't been at a GDC since 2018. Because of my job at the time, between 2011 and 2017 I used to have to attend a lot of games events per year for work. The main three I was usually assigned to were E3, GDC, and PAX West. I used to explain to younger people asking which conference to go to that the PAX events are audience-oriented, GDC is developer-oriented, and E3 was press-oriented, but now the whole constellation of events is collapsed. And with all funding and jobs being completely vanished off the face of the earth since 2022, maybe a lot of that energy is just spilling onto the few events that are left.
I can't tell whether this is just my perspective changing, or a real change, or the result of everyone needing funding and only thinking and talking about funding all week long, but it felt very distinctly to me that GDC is really now on some level just a business event wearing a conference as a mask. It felt more like that to me this year than it did even back when I worked for Tencent and had the job of actually taking notes in business meetings all GDC long.
I'm very tired and burnt out so I think this impression of mine must be at the very least 49% pure emotion. But still! Those are the vibes I absorbed this year.
In the end, maybe the thing that made it worth it for me was simply having an opportunity to ride the new electric Caltrain. The last time I was in the Bay Area, I was in the old gallery cars. But this time I got to ride these beautiful babies. Check out that promotional site for videos and diagrams of some trains (which will seem merely perfectly ordinary to you if you live in Europe or Asia). Unfortunately, the site is a bit old, and the "immersive virtual reality experience" linked there is no longer available.
I organized my entire trip to SF so that I could ride these trains. I flew into San Jose and took the train up from Santa Clara station to the city, then back down again on Friday afternoon. The trains are clean and nice and quiet and they look great. Inside and out!!
Here is a picture from Wikimedia Commons user Mliu92. There's at least one good thing in Silicon Valley, and this is it:
