PixelVixen707

One thing I’ve noticed as a noob to this conference is how many people seem to know each other. It’s homecoming week for many gamemakers who fly in from the East Coast or their scattered academic gigs, and happily greet each other in the halls. Out of the 20,000 people who wander through this thing and barely even know their own names by the end, this crew are the “in-crowd.” But I don’t mean that in a clique-ish way. They’re more like old summer camp buddies, meeting up year after year after year.

That struck me at today’s Game Design Challenge panel. This is a yearly event led by Eric Zimmerman - clearly another GDC mainstay - where three top designers have to sketch out a game around some zany idea that Zimmerman has handed them. Last year, it was a game that could be played by at least two different species. This year, it was a sex game - specifically, an autobiographical sex game. The title was “My First Time.”

I’ll skip Sulka Haro’s pitch, although his idea was the simplest and the one I’d be most likely to play. His game was titled “Your First Time,” and it challenged players to share a story about their first kiss, first hug, or first boot-knocking, and then you look up goofy pics on Flickr and everybody has a laugh.

But it wasn’t an autobiographical game, and Haro was pretty open about being pretty shy about his late-blooming sex life. Meretzy had no qualms. He started by talking about what a geek he was in high school. The second geekiest-kid had watched “half an episode of Star Trek“; Meretzky attended the first Star Trek convention ever. Naturally, those kinds of kids don’t get laid too often, and it wasn’t until partway through MIT before Meretzky gave up his flower.

But sex wasn’t really the point of his talk, or the point of his game. (The game turned out to be some kind of interactive fiction thing, the details were vague.) It was more interesting to hear him talk about being a geek - and in particular, the terrible moment at age 14 when he realized this wasn’t some phase he was going to outgrow. He knew he’d always be “a social pariah.”

But as a geek, he found his calling. He wound up as a superstar game designer. And more importantly, he had a community. He told the story of coming to the GDC a few years ago, after a tragedy in the family: his uncle had just died, and he was late to the conference because he attended the funeral. He hadn’t mentioned it to too many people, but when he got here, everyone asked him about it, or gave him their best, or shared some concern. He’d found an extended family, a family that accepted him just the way he was.

Awwwwwwwwwww.

The deal with Kelley and Robinson’s project is a little funnier. They came in at the last minute when Kim Swift, the supergoddess lead designer of Portal, had to bail. Kelley volunteered to her friend Zimmerman, and she roped in Robinson because when she was spitballing ideas, Robinson shot back, “Why don’t you have a game where you have to count the ceiling tiles?”

Their games were funny - a series of mini-games about every fumbling moment from picking the garlic out of your food to making the first move because the boy’s too scared. They were true, too, and kudos to these ladies for sharing any of this stuff in front of a mostly male (but commendably mature) crowd.

I mean, I know I wouldn’t do it. But then again, I’m new here. It’s not my family.