Back at the beginning of March I blew a slightly ridiculous proportion of my annual savings on a pair of transatlantic flights, seven nights in a mid-market hotel, and a ticket to GDC. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made and I will do it again next year or die trying.

I still couldn’t afford to get into GDC proper and made do with a Summits and Tutorials pass – for the uninitiated, the first two days of the week are occupied by a load of specialist summits focused on topics like education, marketing, and independent games, with the main conference running from Wednesday through until Friday. I spent most of my time at the Independent Games Festival, made notes on all the sessions, and will be writing it up (eventually!) as part of my coverage for DarkZero. However, the IGF wasn’t even half the story.

By far the best thing about my trip was meeting new people and socialising with my peers! Perhaps this is a bigger deal for me than for most people since I live in the middle of nowhere, work alone, and am generally quite asocial, but to be able to sit round a dinner table and talk about design theory and indie development with like-minded people was a profound experience – I’m not used to the idea of even having peers. Talking to people about their own work, playing each others’ games, bouncing ideas around… it was great! It makes me feel pretty jealous of groups like bitcollective and CB2Indies, who can meet up whenever they want.

That said, I also enjoyed the mystique of being barely known. I think I do a pretty good job of demonstrating I Know What I’m Talking About, and being able to walk into a close-knit group of developers as a complete stranger and hold my own in a discussion felt nice. I had a bunch of business cards printed up listing just my name, website and email addresses, and describing my job as ‘Game Theorist’. I was amazed at how many people asked me to explain this term, but it turned out to be a handy ice-breaker! Recruiters seemed pretty fascinated with my work (that can’t all have been professional diplomacy, right?) but – predictably – they didn’t have many suitable vacancies for me. For the sake of checking, I made a point of asking every big company recruiting on the expo floor whether they have any positions in gameplay theory or research, and they all just looked at me funny.

The one thing I didn’t do enough of was actual game dev stuff. Without having a laptop to work on, I couldn’t really do anything, or show people the unfinished stuff I’ve been working on – the one time any of my games saw any light was when I played a couple of rounds of Turn-Based Pong with Amon26, who seemed to enjoy it! I would have liked to have more stuff like that to drop on people. There was at least one big game jam that I had to miss just because the only tools I had to work with was my copy of Wario DIY. My other big problem was not being able to get in touch with people easily to arrange plans, but after buying a cheap phone/SIM card I’m now fully equipped to leverage future US-based social networking opportunities.

With few exceptions, GDC is probably quite meaningless from a consumer perspective. Speaking as a game theorist and indie designer, it’s pretty much the best week of the year! The feeling that you can just be yourself – a nerd in the heart of a global nerdmoot – is wonderful. In a way, I feel like the other 51 weeks of the year are just preparation time for next year’s GDC.