The Extended Family
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.”
