Saturday 31 March 2018

GDC 2018

This year I was accepted by Different Games to attend Games Developers Conference in San Francisco as one of their ambassadors. Different Games is a collective of alternative and indie game designers, educators and other DIY voices in games that hosts conferences, workshops and other events around the US and Canada. It was an incredible experience to be able to attend such a big industry event as a graduate student and my goals for the week was really just to try to learn and do as much as I could without burning out.




Different Games hosted a mini-conferences for all the ambassadors to introduce themselves and their work/research on the day before GDC opened which served as a great way to begin some conversations that would last the week as we bump into each other at different north east south west halls of the Moscone Center half zombified. I started off GDC by attending most of the level design workshops and the rest of the week was filled with other level design related talks and a few narrative and storytelling talks. I consciously chose to go with more workshops as oppose to social and political talks. Not to diminish the importance of politics and activism in games and games industry (it was a good year for that too #unionization), and of course in my academic work I write extensively about the political dimensions of video games and play as a necessarily counter to capitalism, I just felt like since I have been to many academic conferences in my life and I will be presenting at the Canadian Game Studies Association Conference in Regina later in the year, I would do something different. Some highlights include:



Explorations in Level Design Part 4

Final Level Design Walkthrough In my final level design exploration, I designed a level that was inspired by the the Last of Us with so...