Going Solo

Well, hard work is relative, right? I mean, it's not a construction job... there are some mind-numbing parts and there are some fun parts, but the overall reason why I do it is just because it's a great way to give back to the community. I think that's the reason why people volunteer in general - they want to feel like they're helping others.

The GDC is how I got into the games industry, so giving back to that - by making sure it's set up so that can happen to other people, that there's the right mix of talks for people who are just starting out, plus a balance between art, design, programming and that sort of thing, it's just a really great way to give back to something that gave a lot to me.

Well... and infinite amount of time is what it feels like [smiles]

The process starts with a meeting after GDC - usually around E3 time - where we try to figure out what we think the trends are going to be, what do we want to encourage people to submit, and so on. People are actually allowed to submit on any topic, and that's one of the cool things about GDC - the crazy variety of talks.

We do suggest some topics that we think are important, though - so last year one was destructible environments, for example - trends from a technical and design perspective. We decide what those are going to be, we put out the call for submissions, which is about July. Then after that closes, we all grind through this totally horrible website that has the submissions on it - the site's really slow, and but the end of it your brain's really fried...

I think there were about 900 submissions last year - it seems to go up by about 50 every year - and there are so many that people on the board tend to only grade a couple of the tracks. I do game design and programming, and if I have a little extra time I do art. Some people do other combinations, but we have enough board members so there's some good overlap there.

So that takes a while, and once submissions are closed there's like a crunch period that we have to grade them all before the advisory board meeting. You want to get through them, but you also want to make sure the quality's there - so you'll pre-load about 30 into your web browser, then read through them, and probably also search on the web for what the person is talking about, other links, and so on.

It can take anywhere from... if it's an obvious ad for their product, we can ding those in a minute or so, but sometimes we'll spend half an hour on a submission. So do the math - 900 submissions... that's a lot of time. We grade them all, without seeing other people's grading, and add comments. It takes a long time.

So then we have the big advisory board meeting, over the space of a weekend, where we argue about which talks we like. I think there are something like 130 main lectures, and I think from the original submissions we only fill half of the slots, and invite the rest. It's about a one in ten strike rate for a submission to be successful in getting in.

After that it's a case of working out what still needs to be covered for the invites, before we go into phase two, which is asking for more information, and then after some more of the process we actually ask the people to speak - that's supposed to happen by November, but sometimes that can carry on all the way to February.

Once that's done we all scramble to do our own talks before the show actually happens - and then on the last day of the show we have a big lunch which is a bit of a post mortem. We get early [attendee rating] scores rights then. And that's it.

My lecture is called "Achievements Considered Harmful?" - there's been a tonne of research in the past year showing that extrinsic motivators, like rewards or money, can actually decrease intrinsic motivation in people, and I'm sure that most people in the industry won't have heard of it.

I'm going to basically review a bunch of this research and then prognosticate what it might mean for game rewards - and then I hope that someone from Microsoft Research, or someone in the audience, will do some actual psyche studies into it. Because I think it's possible that all this achievement stuff is actually putting people off games in the long term - in the near term I think it makes people more into it, but if it does eventually destroy intrinsic motivation... we might be shooting ourselves in the foot.