Last week I attended the Game Developers Conference (GDC). It is a too-massive industry-focused event that I have not been to since 2019. I was pretty nervous to go; I (like everybody???) developed travel anxiety as public life reopened in 2021 and 2022, and I also (like everybody???) have felt pretty isolated for years. There are more factors than lockdown to this; the lonely last stages of my PhD dissertation, moving to a city where I knew no one, and starting a job while things were still mostly online and where I don’t interact with my co-workers that often. I was hesitant to go, especially as some research done by Ben Abraham of AfterClimate showed that this one single round-trip from Calgary to San Francisco was 70% of my work’s carbon emissions for the year!! (BTW really excited to share this report with you all!! It has lots of great data about the carbon cost of servers and Solar Server in particular. It will come out after Known Mysteries, so pretty soon!)
Anyway, I ended up having a great time.
It was so incredible to reconnect with people I haven’t seen in 4 years or more. I had worried people I was once in community with had forgotten that I existed, so it was really affirming to have people say it was nice to see me or that reached out so we could catch up. I met some people IRL for the first time which was wonderful. I am part of Different Games Collective, so I got to meet a bunch of our really great ambassadors (people we give free GDC tickets to because we think their work is amazing). I’m not really sure how long I will “belong” as GDC (if I ever did) as it seems like the weird experimental spaces are dying out, but I will enjoy my time there while it lasts. It was a bit weird to be back in the Bay Area, which I left in 2021 for very cold Canada and especially cold Calgary. I had to remind myself that places always seem better when you visit as a tourist rather than live in as a broke grad student.
I went to GDC because I was a part of the Indie Soapbox panel, alongside Lucas Johnson (Studio Director, Silverstring Media Inc.) Gerben Grave (Narrative Designer, Multiverse Narratives) Bahiyya Khan (Game Designer, Writer and Filmmaker, Independent) and Tanya Kan (Director and Executive Producer, Vivid Foundry Corp.). I thought our panel was awesome and everyone had really different talks. People seemed to like Solar Server and I got positive feedback after—though people did laugh out loud when I said I was making a web server on my apartment balcony to host videogames.
The panel should be up on GDC’s Vault one day, but in the meantime I thought I would share a virtual talk I did last year for the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA). It talks about the intentions and process for building the server, some theory, and a bit about Known Mysteries, though it was still early-ish in its creation. Enjoy!
Known Mysteries is generally done, and I’m working to have the website sturdy enough to release it. I’m thinking through my least favourite part of game design: promo. I’m quite sure I will release it for Pay What You Want (partly because I think that is right to do for this and partly because it would be a big hassle to get the website to store login info and payment systems). If you like what I am doing, I would really appreciate if you became a paid subscriber here on Substack. I think you can go to as little as $5CAD/month. Then when all the future games come out, you won’t need to pay any more. Thank you for considering!