What I learned after over 200 GDC talks

After GDC 2017 I was lucky enough to get a GDC Vault access so I decided there and then that I would cram as many talks as I could. Throughout the year I spent a lot of time watching and listening to all kinds of talks available. And I only achieved this number by doing it at any extra possible time. Cooking, eating, cleaning, doing laundry, shaving and stretching are great moments to cram some content since those are the kinds of activities that do not require that much attention, but still need to get done. I definitely recommend enjoying your food instead of watching something. In my case adding a 30min talk during lunch breaks that I would be eating alone anyway does stack up throughout the year.

Please remember, all these values are approximations as some talks got canceled, others got added and not everything (like round tables) is available online. Also they vary wildly in time, some go a couple minutes over, a few end with 10min to spare.

Here is a breakdown according to my GDC 2017 Pocket Guide:

           Talks       Hours
Monday    53 / 110  35,5 /  79,5
Tuesday   54 / 154  40,5 / 117,0
Wednesday 48 / 179  39,0 / 164,0
Thursday  44 / 182  36,5 / 159,0
Friday    18 /  95  16,0 /  85,0

Totals:  217 / 720  167,5 / 604,5
//        (27,7%)      (30,1%)

In a nutshell: I watched about a quarter of the convention while consuming about a third of its content.

Anything that sounded interesting I would give it a try. After so many talks I got pretty good at deciding which ones were worth going all the way, and which ones I should cut early. If a talk hasn't "picked up" in the first 5min, it hardly will.

And what did I learn then, you ask? Lot's of things, but there is one point that really sticks out. And guess what? It has nothing to do with games. It has to do with working together, being creative, leveraging your colleagues strengths while compensating your weaknesses. You know what it is deep inside, you have always known: Communication!

And not just how effective you are at communicating with your direct co-workers. This encompasses every kind of communication. Including how you communicate with your players! A bad development hick can be smoothed out with proper communication with your player base. The opposite though is not true, this is a one way road. Bad communication will not make a good feature great.

How you communicate with your co-workers, with your team, with your investors, publishers and your customers, even how your company communicates with you! All of that matters, and it matters a lot. Every single job posting out there asks for "great communication skills". Yet, it doesn't seem like we are getting much better at it. Why? I don't know. But my current theory is that we are not caring enough about it.

In general we understand the importance of communication, yet we spend hours and years getting better at our "hard skills" (like programming, designing, drawing, etc...) but not nearly enough into our MOST important skill, communicating! After diving some more into communication issues all the sources I found seem to agree in one thing: The very first step into communicating better, is to listen.

Jesse Schell GDC talk from 2015 gives a great introduction to the issue: Game Studio Management: Making It Great

According to him difficult conversations are things you want to say to someone, but you don't really want to say for a myriad of reasons. Any difficult conversation is a massive information block. His advice is to, instead of dumping a bunch of "dos and don'ts", say something on the lines of "I feel this way about X, and I want to understand your point of view". This way you can maximize listening.

So, to all my fellow developers and human beings out there, I ask you only one thing: Communicate better.

Thank you very much!

May 2018 bring you great adventures.

PS: Here are my GDC 207 Talk recommendations: