Well, I am back in the hotel room, and I have a moment to mull over my GDC education.
But not MUCH of a moment... sometime in the next hour I have to move all my stuff to another hotel room. Best Western Americania is a harsh mistress.
So in place of a full rundown of the hurricane that has been Team Winterbottom's GDC Adventure, here's the first important thing I learned this week:
A conference doesn't really begin until the first drink is poured.
Even if that drink happens to be a glass of water with a lemon jammed on the side, this old adage holds true. On Day One, I felt strangely alone in the Moscone Convention Center... despite a few good lectures, I found my eyes drifting, checking out the corners of the high-vaulted ceiling and wondering that old application-essay-standard: "What the hell do I expect to get out of this?" It wasn't til Tuesday evening that I really found my sea-legs, and I found them at an "Indie Game" party downtown. I was moving through the tangle of torsos, finding old friends and managing to meet some new ones despite the bass-thumping remix of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turles (NES) shaking my glass, when I realized: this is a concentration of some of the most interesting people I'll ever know. These folks are going to change the landscape of entertainment in the next ten years and holy shit, they are spilling their drinks on my shoes.
Somehow this knowledge made me relax... it made me an active part of the crowd instead of a willing outsider. And in a conference, you NEED to be a part of the crowd... there's a riptide pulling you from one twenty-minute conversation to another, and if you fight it you'll get nothing for your time and plastic that you couldn't have gotten at the University of Podcast.
Well, that's not exactly true. You might still get on fake TV, which is also a lot of fun.
Allright, the maid's knocking and I still have pants all over the floor. I'll write more later... and SOON, after some of the GDC dust has hit the floor, I plan to resume using this blog for its original intention... to discuss new ways to advance the power of narrative in games. (Thanks, RJ, for reminding me by example what it SHOULD be all about).