GWSIG GDC 2006 Plans
International Game Developers Association
|| Game Writers SIG || Current Initiatives || Improving Conference Offerings
Session Ideas
- Game Documentation Best Practices
- Narrative in the MMOG
Contacts with GDC planners
Sheri: GDC Tutorial Declined: This past year was my third year being accepted as a speaker and I used to work for a company that had its CEO on the GDC Advisory board (which is the group that rates and helps pick out the various sessions people submit). So here's a few things:
- A) Ed if it was "Carrie" that was the organizer then you can bet
Eric meant Carrie Gale who is the IGDA Chicago Chapter coordinator, she is not on the GDC Advisory Board. For those that went to GDC you'll see small bios of everyone on the board in the big program and they are also on the GDC site as well.
- B) Tutorials are >THE< hardest things to get accepted at GDC. In
fact the order from easiest to hardest to get accepted is: Roundtable, Panel, Lecture (1-Hour), Lecture (2-Hour/Sponsored), Tutorial (In general the keynotes aren't submitted but usually requested by the board. So if you are going for a full-day tutorial you are talking a tough thing to get accepted especially if...
- C) you have no "stars" or "veteran speakers". You are more
likely to get accepted if 1) you have someone considered an industry "star" on the docket (brings people in) or 2) you have a veteran speaker. In general, and especially for tutorials, it helps to have that veteran not only be someone that probably did a panel/lecture (though veteran tutorial is even better) but someone that also got rated highly each time they spoke. If your ratings from those slips of papers they give attendees at each session are low they will look at that. They do not want to bring back anyone who got rated low, regardless of the reason.
- D) Since "Game Writing" is still fairly new, and most game
writing is still done by designers that causes two problems. 1) They probably don't feel there are a lot of specific, part-time/full-time designated game writers that are attending GDC (let alone wanting to pay for an expensive tutorial pass). 2) Since most writers are also game designers and they already had Noah's game design workshop on one day and the two-day game design workshop selected as tutorials they might have felt there was not enough attendees to go around to also attend a writing workshop, let alone enough interested since game writing isn't very highly prized yet.
- E) I didn't get to look in-depthly at the archived emails but
the number of people you have on the tutorial makes a difference, especially if they aren't already selected to speak at GDC anyways. The reason is that EVERY speaker at GDC gets a free Giga Pass whether they are doing one hour panel or a full-day tutorial. They hate giving out lots of unnecessary Giga passes and so that's why they hate even seeing big panels. If you had a ton of people on there who weren't already probably going to be accepted for other sessions during normal GDC it makes it tough. So they will outright go "why do they need X amount of people not Y (where X is greater than Y)? They might look at part of it as just people wanting to gain the Giga passes (even if it is not true).
