Whyos

It was nice to get out to SF and meet with friends at the Game Developers Conference, but there were no really compelling tech stories, in terms of either vision or product, and that’s what I show up for. This may well come largely from the state of the economy and its near term effect on innovation. It seems to me that GDC now serves two primary purposes; training for big conventional PC and console games (for which it really does make sense to have a centralized function like this), and a massive game industry career-fest.

But many of the most interesting things in games these days thoroughly bleed over into other online categories as well; hence, much that is of games doesn’t need to be at a GDC. For years, I’ve been missing SXSW Interactive, as it tends to come a week or two before GDC, and both combined would be more conference than I really want in a month. But next year, I think I’ll head to Texas, instead, as that seems like a bit more fun and just as relevant now.

I actually think this is a nice turn of events, as it demonstrates games’ integration into the broader, more DIY-able, technology ecosystem, from which it has been absent for some time.  For the first half of this decade, each year I’d ask friends in the scene for lists of indie games to publish as a special label at Electronics Boutique, but there was never sufficient volume of quality to make that happen. Now, though, that would be no problem, and one thing I did quite enjoy at GDC was how consistently good the Independent Game Festival finalists were, while a few years ago, these games tended to be derivative and fairly lame.