What is GDC?
February 16, 2008Note: This blog post falls under multiple categories, and while one of those is “Main Content”, I don’t plan to split it up into multiple descriptions. I kept it pretty basic though.
GDC is the Game Developers Conference. It is the main annual industry event for game developers. There are many other conferences devoted to games, and there are other “chapters” of this conference that happen in other places around the world (Austin, Europe, and Tokyo), however I recognize this as the most important one for the Western World. It is a five day conference, but the main conference and expo happen during the last three days of it. The first two days are for full day instructional tutorials. I have never been to them because they almost double the cost of attending the conference and generally don’t seem like they would “double” the overall experience. There are also smaller parallel conferences that happen at the same time for the sub-industries: mobile games, casual games, and serious games.
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The main conference has many different sessions in a variety of different formats. They cover the range of topics that face game developers in their work, and are presented as lectures, discussions, and panels. There is also an expo floor, where companies have booths set up to pitch their products, company, middleware, fancy peripherals (i.e. smell-o-vision), school, or bookstore. It’s all very exciting and often involves swag (promotional crap like t-shirts, pens, and bouncy balls). There are also nightly parties and get-togethers for various crowds to meet up and network.
