Last month, I ran a novel panel session at Austin GDC, which was well-attended and (apparently) well-liked.

I came up with the format myself, very different from normal panels, and spent a couple of months fleshing it out with the panellists, discussing different ways we could improve on it, different approaches, etc. I made a lot of mistakes with it, but I was pleased with how it went for a first attempt.

We filled about 1/2 of the room, I think the capacity was around 200. I’d hoped for more – but … we were scheduled on the second-to-last slot, on the last day of the conference, when lots of people had already gone home.

We were also scheduled at the same time as Nicole Lazzaro, and Damion Schubert. They are both exceptional – and exceptionally popular – speakers.

So … I was pretty happy we got the crowd that we did :).

It all went so well that I thought the organizers of the “main” GDC – the one in San Francisco – might like something similar. So, I contacted them (not exact email, some details snipped):

I just ran a really good session at Austin GDC, and thought that something similar might work really well for GDC 2010. And several people who want something like this at GDC have asked me to at least try :).

It was a novel format that I came up with originally, and then hammered out the details with the panellists over a couple of months until we were happy with it. Now we’ve live-tested it, I could do it even better next time :).

Is it worth me taking this further? I’d have to find a new set of panellists, and work out a new topic appropriate to GDC (as opposed to AustinGDC).

Here’s the salient part of the response I got:

Thank you for your email. If you’ve already done this session I would advise against a repeat at GDC, especially if it’s a panel proposal because panels are very hard to advance to Phase 2 and get accepted.

(NB: the wording is “I would advise”, but the email itself didn’t provide any of the details or info I’d need on how to submit this panel, so I read this as a polite but fairly strong: “no”).

My first reaction was that I’m quite relieved NOT to spend all the time and effort it takes finding another 4 top-class speakers, persuading them to speak, working with them on format and content, and organizing everything in the months leading up to the conference.

(for which – unlike most industries – GDC speakers get nothing in return. Oh, you do get an invite to a party. But it’s just like the 15 other parties that all the non-speakers get to go to. So … not a huge benefit, really)

I’m not going to hassle them to try to change their minds.

But then I thought a bit more, and wondered why it was that the conference organizers aren’t biting my arm off, demanding that we do this again? (assuming the session was as well-received as I thought it was). They’re always deflecting criticisms of “poor” sessions with “we’re dependent on the quality of what gets submitted”. In the past year, I’ve also seen a couple of friends get some of the highest-rated feedback from past GDC’s and yet seemingly the organizers don’t want them back again.

So, I’m left wondering what the strategy is here. There must – surely – be *some* strategy for a money making machine like GDC (this thing is making 6-figure profits each year). I’m just confused as to what it is.

Also, as an aside, since I rarely go to conferences these days unless I’m speaking at them, I probably won’t be at GDC next year. This year, surprisingly many people asked me why I was bothering to go to GDC at all (despite the fact I was a speaker :)). By the tenth time of being asked, I’d realised that my justifications owed as much to nostalgia and socialisation as to a useful use of my time. I was already feeling dubious about turning up next year, even before I heard my proposals had been rejected. So, just to be clear: I’m not skipping it because of this response from the organizers, although if they’d been keen for me to give the talk, it would have forced my hand into going.

My GDC 2009 talk is up on the site – How to sell social-networking pitches/concepts to your Boss … and to your Publisher.

Now that the submission / selection process for GDC 09 is coming to an end, here’s a few thoughts on the new process (CMP / Think Services substantially reformed the conference-submission process this year):
(if you haven’t been following, I periodically write something about ways we can improve the games industry conferences)

1. About this time of year I would normally be thinking “I really need to start on the details of my talk now. Given how busy I am, I’ll need 3 weeks to practice it, and do one final re-write before the conf”. Instead? I’m thinking: “my talk is already written. I have nothing left to do!”. Cool! It’s great to have one less big thing to do…
2. …except, of course, there is something left to do: I need to add all the graphics and do a run through to make sure it all makes sense and flows. I hope the new process hasn’t lulled me into a false sense of security.
3. …AND: usually when I get to a conference, I only got the final polish on the presentation 1-3 weeks earlier (depends how busy I was; sometimes I get fed up with it the night before, and I do some big changes a mere 3 hours before the talk. Especially true if I’m jetlagged and I wake up on the morning of the talk at 4 am anyway) – so it’s all fresh in my mind; I know this is common for a lot of speakers (we’re all busy people, and we don’t get paid for this, so have to fit it in around our day jobs). I have a semi-photographic memory, so I can usually give a talk even if I lost all the slides. This gets offset by the jetlag from flying 6,000 miles to California, and the inevitable hangovers from the GDC parties. In the end it all works out as “OK”; I wonder if it’ll be harder this year? (I wrote the whole talk 6 months before the conference!)
4. CMP’s organization didn’t quite work this year – they missed their own deadlines for reviewing talks and getting back to speakers by 1-2 months. I’ve asked around among friends who are speaking too, from really niche talks to keynoters, and although there is some variation by “importance” of talk (the bigger name, the sooner you heard back, *mostly*), everyone got their responses much later than we were told we would. Shrug. We’re used to this :) – and this is a new way of handling the organization, so I’m sure there were lots of teething problems and unexpected holdups. We’ll just have to see if it goes closer-to-schedule next year, when they’ve debugged it a bit.
5. The accidents that lead to CMP exposing on their website the earliest talks as they were confirmed made for a really interesting lead-up (for other speakers, who could briefly see what was appearing). I’ve already had 3 or 4 mass emails from CMP this year “announcing” batches of new talks that were “just confirmed”. This is standard marketing practice (and they do it each year). But it’s so 1990.
   • Howabout an RSS feed that shows each *individual* talk the moment it goes on the system? That would be awesome and … here’s a headsup to CMP: I would actually bother to read it!
   • These mass-emails of hilighted talks bore the tits off me: with 300+ talks, and one of your marketing dept picking 5-10 they “think” we’d all be interested in, for me as an individual, they get it wrong nearly every time … with all 10 of their picks. It’s statistically practically guaranteed! Theirs is a hopeless task, one I don’t envy. Give us an RSS feed! :)
   • BONUS: if you RSS feed it, you’ll *allow* the chance of news outlets picking up on each and every interesting talk as and when it’s announced. IMHO, you’d actually get overall more exposure. Since you wouldn’t need to “pick and choose”, you’d also be more likely to big-up the interesting talks by accident, since at the moment you just kill the news on them, instead of supporting it.

Also, this year I will once again be mobilizing every industry-insider I can to blog their own detailed writeups of every session they go to, via the Games Industry Conglomerate RSS Feed Of Awesomeness (feed will be updated nearer the time).

(FYI: we’re fed up of non-professionals reviewing conference talks, and either reporting what they’re told without realising when a developer is bullshitting them, or adding their own interesting but often uninformed opinions. We do love them for reporting it, and doing their best – but if you’ve never developed or published a game, there’s *so much* you can’t help but fail to appreciate about what you’re listening to. Sorry. This is not a marketing conference, its a development conference; we need developers reporting it (in addition to the journalists).

For a long period recently they didn’t even bother writing up transcripts of the sessions – so all the world was left with was a summary through the mind of someone who didn’t know what they were looking at. For some talks that’s fine, but at the world’s biggest game-conference for Professionals, with tons of detailed talks and subtle acts of brilliance, it’s just Not Enough.

No more! We transcript, and we comment, and some of us even like to bitch (and praise) quite openly about what’s being put out by the speaker.)