THE BEST GDC 2023 TALKS THAT I’VE WATCHED SO FAR
I sat through a bunch of free lectures from this year’s Game Developers Conference and you can too
I am unlikely to ever attend GDC in person but I have spent a lot of time watching talks from the conference the past few years. For 2023, hundreds of video lectures have been made free to watch. Please note that the direct links below might result in a sign-in page. If that happens, find them from the overall list of free talks. Where possible I’ve included the YouTube versions as embeds.
I also want to note - and this isn’t exclusive to GDC - that titles of talks can be deceptive. Would you be drawn to something called Fighting Latency on Call of Duty: Black Ops III? Probably not - but what if I told you that 2016 talk was actually about how an entire department was stumped by an apparent latency problem - even though the netcode was fine but negative feedback from gameplay testing persisted - and in order to find the cause the speaker went down a ridiculous forensic rabbit hole which involved filming two monitors with iPhone cameras for dozens of hours to discover the cause? Sadly that can’t fit into a neat title.
Here’s my selection of the talks I’ve seen so far with my comments. In general I think the overarching theme that unites these disparate topics is passion.
A Moderation Guide for Successful Brand Livestreams and Digital Events - Victoria Tran, Kat Lo
I laugh-yelled at the screen when Lo pointed out that the Twitch chat they ran for an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stream encountered drastically far less toxicity than the Jimmy Fallon version that was live at the same time, which is hilarious to me as someone who previously worked in broadcast TV. It is bitterly ironic that game developers and livestreamers are effectively reinventing a new type of gallery and outclassing the people who should definitely know better.
There is plenty in this talk to take notes on, from practical advice (make a run sheet for events!) to overarching moderation principles (establish clear chat guidelines, please!) that extend beyond running a Twitch stream into community management.
'God of War Ragnarok': Building the UI for a AAA Sequel - Zach Bohn
Pretty much everyone in any discipline should watch this talk because it’s not just about the user interface. At one point the speaker takes a three-minute aside to talk about the importance of fonts because "No one else on my team cares about them but I do" so it's the exact right balance of bitterness and career experience without coming across as condescending. The speaker also notes that - and I paraphrase - "I spent three months fixing the Korean on Spider-Man and I never wanted to do that on any project ever again". For those who haven’t ever touched localization, this to me means signals that the speaker has seen the wars and lived to tell the tale.
Additionally, the subtext of this talk is that Santa Monica Studios has seemingly very robust communications between its departments and I’d love to hear a separate lecture on the matter.
Animation Summit: 'Potionomics' Show and Tell - Anguel Bogoev
Do not be fooled by the laidback appearance of the speaker. People that know their craft but tell you to go and live life experiences in order to understand what it is you're trying to do in any industry are rare to come across. It's only a half hour long and should have been twice the length, probably with a theatre workshop in the middle, and is reminiscent of the Every Frame A Painting video on Chuck Jones.
Even for non-animators this talk is very approachable and filled with gems. For me the main one is the importance of finding what the speaker calls the “TM Pose” for characters that could just as easily be about a Steam capsule image or box art.
Advanced Graphics Summit: 'Marvel's Spider-Man' Remastered: A PC Postmortem - Rebecca Fernandez O'Shea, Michiel Roza
An hour-long talk about porting Spider-Man Remastered from Playstation to PC which sounds like a worse nightmare than the inverse because of the complexity of setups involved (as opposed to a console's highly specific hardware setup). The first half about ray tracing escapes me because I truly don't have it in me to understand vector and matrix math or whatever a BLAS/BVH is - I just know it’s complicated.
However the second half contains a lot of good remarks about how they not only accommodated and guarded themselves against PC players (particularly their GPUs), but they also discuss the problem of getting the game to run on ultra widescreens, or multi monitor setups or how PC players have a habit of, say, combining their modern GPUs but are also overclocking their CPU that’s ten years older than the minimum spec. I might have scoffed if I didn’t have first-hand customer service experience of this exact issue. It’s reassuring to me that even the folks in the AAA sphere have to deal with people’s computers defaulting to integrated graphics.
If you have never put a game out on PC, take notes from these people.
'TUNIC': This Was Here the Whole Time - Andrew Shouldice
I had initially held off on this talk as I've already played about 10 hours of it but I figured that I'd seen and puzzled out enough of the game’s design in that time. I’m happy to say that it did not reveal anything I didn't already know or suspect - and I won’t spoil anything either - though if you're planning on playing TUNIC (and you should), maybe wait until you get to the game’s very obvious halfway point before watching this talk.
The speaker breaks down the apparent tightrope walk of making the game just obscure enough but also not off-putting or obnoxious in its obscurity. The speaker frequently refers to James Crawford's talk “Preserving a Sense of Discovery in the Age of Spoilers” that you should also watch. It also calls to mind one of Noah Caldwell Gervais’ roadtrip videos (I sadly can't remember which one) wherein he talks about "qos" which is the word a travel writer gave to that sense of mystery for what's just over the hill.
For me the point of the talk is "have a good set of design principles, know when to be subtle and when to point giant arrows at the player". Tangentially, Crawford's talk discusses something I've been concerned with on and off the past couple of years, which is the notion that players come to your game for different reasons. It's not necessarily a bad thing that someone is only interested in, say, mechanical complexity, because having a subset of players fixated on that one thing has the pleasant side effect of them becoming advocates for your game, which is very good for "mystery" games and something that traditional PR fails at.
Localization of 'Cyberpunk 2077': Technology, Tools, and Approach - Tommi Nykopp, Mikolaj Szwed
Back at PAX West 2019 I told Danny O'Dwyer of noclip fame that the Witcher 3 localization documentary video they did (which is criminally under-watched and also very funny) was one of the best depictions of localization that I'd seen. The noclip video only covered the people, whereas this is a thorough explanation of CDPR's in-house tech and methods which I highly endorse, though the technical end of things may be very hard to follow and not just because of the thick accent of the speaker.
I was surprised to hear that CDPR works with single-language vendors for each locale, and that they highly scrutinize vendors before settling with them which I think is unusual for “big” companies to do. At the same time, they've been at this for decades so there's clearly a lot of built-up institutional knowledge as well as actual in-house technology that the talk goes at length to explain. This is best-in-class stuff that I think far exceeds what PlatinumGames or Sega’s localization team for the Yakuza series do because of the additional hurdle of supporting multiple VO languages. Not once did I hear a mention of any sort of open source CAT tool.
Localization is a completely solvable problem and CDPR is one of the rare few companies out there that knows exactly what it takes to do it right.
Honorable Mention: 'Us vs. Them' and the LaserDisc Debacle of 1984 - Warren Davis
A kind of postmortem of the “fling stuff at the wall and see what sticks" era of arcade machines. Maybe the recent VR hardware race of the past few years recaptures some of it but we're unlikely to see this sort of innovation ever again. LaserDiscs were a fantastically daft media format, more so than MiniDiscs, which at least saw some use as voice recorders in journalism (and also weren’t 12 inches in diameter).
I don’t have any major takeaways here - it’s an entertaining tale reminiscing on a bygone era.
A Side Note About Any Sponsored Slot (Presented by Company/Brand)
The seven talks mentioned above are the ones I’m recommending - I’ve left out the multiple hours of me watching a lot of GDC talks that are obvious sponsor slots. Such talks tend to be very dry. However, there is a utility to them that's not immediately obvious, and leans more on the in-person aspect: networking.
If it’s a presentation by gaming peripheral companies or some kind of gaming-adjacent platform - such companies can have a not-insignificant install base of users. Networking with such folk and agreeing to implement whatever API in your game can potentially lead to things like:
featuring on whatever app or site they have that their customer base uses
a relatively cheap way to get some free keyboards or monitors for your studio
Don’t underestimate that upper end of content creators and hardware enthusiasts that genuinely like to trick out their PC rigs - in my limited experience they're the sort of person who might not even touch your game if it doesn’t support their light-up keyboard.
If it’s a talk presenting the new workflow of some sort of software or middleware, chances are other people attending are the ones that live and breathe that thing in your industry. If you’re a newcomer, this is your chance to find the established veterans, some of whom might be willing mentors.
I may do a follow-up to this if enough of the remaining ~200 talks that I’ve yet to go through catch my eye, though I’d instead prefer that this post inspires you to pay more attention to the industry at large.