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Transcript
Oh, you want me to cover GDC, do you? You want me to have to traipse back and forth for hours across a crowded show floor looking for one couch out of the thousands visible that it would be socially acceptable to sit on. You want me to leave the house and meet other human beings so that in the future when I inevitably need to urinate all over their games I have to suppress feelings of shame as well as the usual self-loathing and urge to masturbate? You want me to interact with other people from my peer group in an environment of mutual interest and respect in order to make friends and regain a sense of perspective and self-worth? Christ, you sound just like my wife. And my therapist. And that mouthy dude at the 7-11. Well, sorry to disappoint but I have misanthropic shut-in things to do, so if you don’t mind I’m just going to walk out of shot to the left.
Thanks to everyone making a big silly fuss over that global planet-scarring plague thing I hadn’t done a convention since E3 in 2019, but now COVID is completely over or at least we all collectively decided that the deaths weren’t so bad weighed against how bored we were of hearing about it, Cons are back on. Although in this case not without having to stand in line for two hours to get the vaccine card checked. GDC, I feel like you’re forgetting about the essential con experience – members of the press like me being able to flash a badge and walk straight past all the queues, floating a little air biscuit as I go. Well, just so you know, once I finally got in I went straight to the media lounge and ate seven complementary bagels, so I win.
In contrast to E3, which is consumer-focussed and places a big emphasis on wowing random dumbos, GDC is more of an industry event, so instead of having to queue up outside entire fucking Halloween haunted houses erected on the show floor so you can play ten minutes of the new Destiny expansion while being lit like the main stage at a strip club, there’s instead five hundred booths full of very earnest people wanting to talk about their indie games. And five hundred more booths of companies pushing some new tech or development tools trying to convince some of the very earnest people in the first group to make a hot app for their new force feedback buttock jigglers.
Frankly, though, we only got to the show floor on our last day, before that it was all one demo showcase after another. But because they were lower profile games these tended be to smaller, intimate experiences where you’re more likely to see an actually interesting game and the devs really wanna win you over. Hence the inevitable bowl of snacks. Which at first I would turn down out of politeness, but by day three I’d learned to always take at least one thing ‘cos then when 2pm rolls around you can convince yourself you’ve actually had lunch.
I can certainly recommend the experience if you’re really really interested in seeing lots of different hotel rooms. Maybe not if you don’t like sprinting back and forth across downtown San Francisco to meet appointments at different hotels. Fortunately San Francisco said “Oh you poor harassed journalists, here’s some lovely sunny weather to ease your burden.” On the first day. On the second day it pissed down so Nick the editor was forced to call an Uber to cross three blocks and I was subsequently forced to call him a great big sook. You’re a bipolar city, aren’t you, San Francisco. “Why d’you say that?? D’you wanna fight?! I’m sorry I didn’t mean that, I love you. Would you like some homeless person’s excrement?” No thank you, San Francisco.
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Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
