This year at GDC I had an amazing 100% streak of seeing all good talks! I credit this to finally being able to intuit a talk’s quality based on how the description in the scheduler is worded (Of course, I have no data on the talks I skipped to back up that they weren’t good. Maybe all talks were just good this year!)
For context, when I go to a talk at a conference, I am looking for practical takeaways. I want to see how designers solved hard problems and learn something that I could feasibly start applying to my work right away. This is not to say that I dislike inspirational talks, I just try and reserve GDC for practical learning. Here were my favorite talks:
- The Gamer’s Brain, Part 2: UX of Onboarding and Player Engagement
- Engines of Play: How Player Motivation Changes Over Time
- Idle Chatter: What We Can Learn from Self-Playing Games
- TL;DR Statistics for Game Devs: the math you need to win arguments
- Rules of the Game: Five More Techniques from Quite Inventive Designers
And now in great detail…