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I don’t know if I’ve used that title before, but I do know once again GDC has come to an end. The Game Developer’s Conference has treated me very well over the past … uhh … darn near 20 years or so, and every year I think I’m going to do a trip report. And every year I don’t. But this year, I do know I’m going to at least give a brief retrospective.

For those that don’t know, the Game Developer’s Conference is one of the largest conventions for computer game developers in the world - it might be the largest, but on the one hand I don’t have Internet yet, and on the other hand just because it’s huge doesn’t mean it’s the biggest. (I used to think San Diego Comic-Con was the biggest media convention, but Comiket is 3 times its size).

In general, I find the biggest bang for the buck at GDC is the first two official days - Monday and Tuesday, the tutorials and summits. The next biggest bang for the buck is ad-hoc meetings between people - just getting together with people in the industry and chewing the fat. But, and this is the question I once had, how do you do that if you don’t know anybody?

That’s why on the next three days they have Roundtables - more informal discussions aimed at people in your specific area. For game AI programmers, there are the AI Roundtables hosted by Neil Kirby, but I’ve been to other roundtables as well, and they’re a great way to both learn about the field and to meet people of all different levels.

Now, the people you meet at a Roundtable may not be your best friends the first time that they meet you, but if you come back again and again - show up, be nice, and try to contribute - you’ll build relationships that are enduring in time. For AI game programmers, there’s the Game AI Programmer’s Guild and some associated dinners; there will be one for your area too.

But beyond the first two days, there’s two or three main draws to the conference for me. There are talks, of course, and some would say that those are the real meat of GDC - we wouldn’t have a reason to come here to network if there wasn’t something we’re here for in the first place, whether it’s a product announcement or a technical talk …

… or an unexpected bit of wisdom, such as the story of the creator of Diablo, who turned down an offer from a friend of a friend to “just let me use that empty room in the back as my office. I’ll give you ten percent of my company.” Diablo was in crunch time, so he told him “get lost kid” … not knowing he was turning down $40 million dollars when Hotmail sold the following year for $400M.

Beyond the talks, there’s the show floor, which is so full of interesting things that you can’t begin to compress it into an easy tale; the pickings are better in some years than others, but you’ll still see amazing stuff.

And … some more inexplicable stuff. I bet you didn’t know cloud computing involved actual clouds, but they had one:

Finally, there’s the GDC store, where you can get swag of all sorts, from GDC gear (which people often see me wearing) to game gear to books of all sorts.

For someone who believes the future of books is bright, I have to admit the pickings seem leaner each year …

… but I still found some awesome books directly related to my area, and as much as we want ebooks to be everywhere, I just moments ago was chatting with someone at work who turned down a free PDF in favor of ordering a physical book on Amazon, because, like me, he found it easier to read that way.

Finally, if you’re not local, GDC is a great chance to experience a new city. San Francisco is great, Union Square is a short walk, and there are many restaurants and coffeehouses and sights and parks that you can experience.

It’s better if you can experience it with friends too - so make time for your friends while they’re in town.

-the Centaur

Ever since one of my childhood art teachers let slip that she’d lost all her childhood art in a fire, I’ve been acutely aware that good things come to an end. This knowledge has led me into what I call good ruts: the cultivation of experiences that work, which I cherish as long as they last.

For me, a lot of these experiences revolve around food, or coffee, or books, or some combination of all three - usually in service of writing. I cultivated going to Mountain View for dinner followed by a visit to Cafe Romanza on Friday nights, since Romanza was embedded in a bookstore and was open to 11, often getting me an hour of reading over dinner and two to three hours of writing before I headed over to Bookbuyers’s used bookstore next door, itself open to midnight. But this pattern has started to crack, as Bookbuyers is slowly contracting itself into a smaller space, and Cafe Romanza has started closing earlier.

There’s an illusion many store owners have that the last hours on their calendar are expendable, because “that’s not when we make money”. The reality is, late hours attract many people to bookstores and coffeehouses and restaurants because people want to chill out and enjoy their purchase - so if you look at your thin last hour and cut it, guess what? All the people like me who were attracted to your store are just going to go somewhere else. Welcome to the death spiral: I’d say something snarky like “I hope you enjoy it” but the truth is I wish you’d see the error of your ways so I could continue to enjoy your establishment.

That’s why places like Coupa Cafe do so well: they specifically cultivate an environment where people don’t get kicked out. But even if the management of a place remains constant, the good ruts sometimes must come to an end, because something always changes. Sometimes that change happens on my end; I used to walk to lunch in Palo Alto, spending half my lunch reading for work and half of it writing for me. But when I changed offices, all those great experiences came to an abrupt and unceremonious end.

But sometimes that change happens not because of a change in the store or a change in me, but because a landlord increases prices, as when the writing group Write to the End had to flee a closing Barnes and Noble when their landlord raised the rent. That landlord was itself struggling to survive and facing a possible bankruptcy, so it doesn’t have to be caused by greed - but sometimes it just is, a raw desire to get a higher paying tenant. I’m all for making money, of course, but the value of a region isn’t the money you make from it, but the people that live there and the institutions that function there and the culture they support.

Which brings us to the point of the essay: all the Chevy’s in San Francisco have closed, victims of rising rents. Rising rents in San Francisco are a disaster: estimates are that over 70 percent of artists were losing their home or business or both, and the remaining 30 percent were in risk of losing their positions. And since I’ve got at least one or two friends who say, “So what? If the prices are rising, move,” let me take a moment out to say FUCK YOU, DUMBASS, because detaching yourself from your local friends-and-family support network is one of the primary risk mechanisms how people end up homeless. I’m a full blooded capitalist, and yet I have zero sympathy for that ignorant, heartless point of view: it really does matter that prices are rising in the Bay Area without limit, and I have heard from everyone from the homeless to bottom-end workers to my peers to upper class to CEOs that the problem is really acute - so I really do have zero patience for the ignorance pseudo-worldly people show towards this very real problem.

But, patience or no, the great oasis I had at the Game Developer’s Conference - heading up the street to Chevy’s for lunch, catching up on reading and planning out the rest of my day - is over. Chevy’s is gone, and I’ll have to find something else.

Ah, Chevy’s at Moscone Center: you will be missed.

-the Centaur