We’ve spent quite a long time now being very excited about the Game Developers Conference. For just over a month, we’ve brought you daily impressions of games to be featured at the Independent Games Festival, which is held at the GDC. So, what exactly is all the fuss about?

The GDC is an annual conference for video game developers. It was originally held in Chris Crawford’s home in San Jose in 1988, and has grown (I am not kidding about this) 666-fold to having 18,000 attendees in 2008, making it the largest industry-only conference in video games. GamesIndustry.biz has recently named the GDC the the most important event of the year for people in the video game industry, with 40% of those surveyed considering the trip “essential.” What’s so essential about this gathering of industry professionals? It provides two major functions for the community: education and networking.

Education
In many ways, the conference bears a strong resemblance to a scientific conference, which is unsurprising due to Crawford’s background in academia. The event hosts over 500 educational sessions, including panels, lectures, and all-day intensive tutorials on topics both broad and fine. Simply looking at the list of discussions will get you thinking about everything that goes into making a game: there’s even a whole lecture called “Weapon Sound Design.”

For easy parsing, the sessions are categorized by subject into different summits and tracks. Coders will likely gravitate to the programming track, while sound designers will find more interesting discussions in the audio track. The more politically-minded developer might find himself at home at the Serious Games Summit, where the sessions will focus on using games technology outside the realm of entertainment, and instead in areas like education, training, and social change.

One of the most common types of educational presentations is the postmortem. Once a game is finished, the developers sit down and talk about what they tried to do, what worked, and what didn’t. This is an essential part of the industry education, because it gives other developers insight into how they can overcome the obstacles in their own work. Postmortems increase the community’s problem-solving skills, allowing more complex development problems to be overcome.

Networking
It’s often said, “It’s not what you know, but who you know,” and this remains true in the video game industry. We’ve been focusing recently on independently made games, which are frequently made by teams of 1-20 people. Yet if sit to watch the number of people in the credits of a big title, like Halo or World of Warcraft, you realize that a large number of people had to come together to make the game. Even if you do make the game yourself, if you want to make any money off of it, you need to find a distributor. Whether you’re looking to find one more animation artist or someone who can help you make your game available to the masses, you need contacts. This is where the GDC’s emphasis on networking comes into play.

Because networking is so essential, the GDC is organized to facilitate human contact before, during, and after the conference itself. The exposition, from this video, to resemble the expo hall at PAX, but with more of an emphasis on the software and hardware behind the games, rather than just the games themselves. While the official website doesn’t go into great detail about the expo hall aside from its hours, previous attendees describe it as more of a party than just a show (we’ve been forewarned of mini bars and cocktail weenies). There’s even an official booth crawl for social mingling, and an official forum for parties and meetups. There are also sponsored lounges that allow convention goers to relax, talk, and enjoy some quality advertising themselves. Not to be outdone by Child’s Play, there’s even a charity poker invitational tournament.

The purchase of a ticket gets you access to “myGDC,” which functions as sort of a social networking site for GDC goers. The site has a private message and friend system, as well as a large number of forums. Rather than having to hang onto all those business cards picked up on the expo floors, myGDC users can look people up and keep in contact with them via this site. In addition to the social networking aspect of myGDC, the recently unveiled Vault section will contain complete audio, video, and presentation documents (e.g. PowerPoint presentations) for all of the sessions held at the conference. The catch? To access the entirety of the vault, you need to have purchased one of the upper echelons of passes, costing upwards of $400 each. So you needn’t be bound by petty rules of time and space when you’re picking the sessions you’d like to see.

There’s More!
Now, if all that education and networking didn’t sound like a game competition, that’s because the GDC itself isn’t. The games we’ve been discussing for the past month are competitors in the Independent Games Festival, which is an event held at the GDC. There will be more about the IGF itself in a separate article, but briefly it is a festival aimed at recognizing excellent, independently produced games. Game developers have a chance to show off their game to publishers, as well compete for fabulous prizes.

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