Tech artists are an important part of GDC: sharing knowledge, inspring people to work smarter, and teaching better ways to get things done are what we do all the time -- doing a talk is just taking your day job on the road. So hurry up and get those proposals together!
After the jump I've reposted an article I did for Game Developer back in 2008 which outlines some of the things I think make for a good GDC talk. Update: I added a longish list of stuff that has changed since the original 2008 article in the comments - in particular, don't forget to read the new submission guidelines and don't forget 25 minute talks if you're getting your feet wet
Why it matters
GDC is important because it is one of the few institutions
devoted to spreading that knowledge around, instead of hoarding it. Older
business has have professional schools and academic wings that help to keep
them vibrant, and though we are gradually evolving these sorts of things as
well we are still, on the whole we still have to do the spade work ourselves.
Being a GDC speaker offers a nice boost to a resume. It
gives you some visibility among your peers and also gives you a chance to
demonstrate your chops in front of an audience that's likely to contain
possible employers who are looking for skills like yours. If all that weren’t enough, speaking at the
GDC earns you a free conference pass, a free tote bag, and the chance to bump
into Will Wright in the speakers lounge. Not surprisingly, a lot of folks would
like to win that coveted speakers badge.
It’s a good thing
that the rewards are so steep (did we mention the tote bag?), because putting together a good talk is a serious
undertaking. It requires serious planning,
because talk proposals are submitted six months or more before the show. It
takes a lot of preparation: creating a slide deck, putting together example
art, and doing enough practice to be a confident presenter. And it’s also
highly competive – only a fraction of the talks that are submitted to the
conference website are approved for the show.
How it works
It helps to understand how the evaluation process works. Proposals
are submitted to the GDC via the conference website at GDConf.com, usually over
the summer of the preceding year. The proposals are vetted by an advisory board
of developers . The conference management recruits advisors from a number of
studios for the various “tracks” or disciplines. The advisory board looks all
of the proposals and ranks them on the appeal of the topic, the quality of the
proposed treatment, and the track record of the speaker.
The board is also responsible for filtering out the large
number of talk proposals that are basically sales pitches or user-group style
sessions.
While there’s nothing inherently wrong with a talk on your fabulous
new motion capture camera or your amazing new paint package, the conference tries to steer clear of
potential conflicts interest by routing these through a separate process . You’ll
see these sorts of talks in the show catalog as “Sponsored” sessions, as in
“Sponsored by Autodesk”. If you’re thinking about a topic that involves a lot
of very particular attention to one product, service or vendor you might want
to get in touch with the conference staff before submitting your proposal in
order to get a little more guidance on the rules for distinguishing between the
regular conference sessions and the sponsored variety.
The Keys to a good talk
When you start to develop your topic, you don’t need to be
too academic. That’s how the programmers
amuse themselves. GDC talk aren’t classroom exercises, they are a chance to
share practical knowledge. The unique value of the show is that it’s oriented
around a professional community. You can
pick up the finer points of Zbrush at your local branch of Gnomon, and you can
get a lot more help for your keyframing skills from a few months of Animation
Mentor than you’ll ever get from a 50 minute lecture. What you can’t get anywhere else is the combination
of technical information and rubber-meets-road experience that comes from other
devs, so a good talk combines technical or artistic command of a given subject
with an understanding of production realities.
The Takeaway
The first thing the advisory boards look for in a proposal
is the “takeaway” – the key nugget of wisdom that the audience will (hopefully)
get from the presentation. From a
selfish standpoint, the conference likes snappy takeaways because those are
what you show your boss when trying to wangle yourself a junket to the
show: Good takeaways make for more
conference goers. More importantly,
though, the takeaway is a the acid test of what you’re trying to say in your
talk – if you can’t figure out the two or three sentence distillation of what
you want to get across, the audience and the reviewers won’t either.
A good takeaway is concise and straightforward. “Attendees
will learn the pros and cons of the major normal mapping techniques, with
particular attention to choosing the right technique for your game genre” is a
good example while “Attendees will learn the coolest normal mapping tricks
EVAR!” is not.
Scope
As we’ve said before, the unique value of a show like the
GDC is the combination of technical and artistic knowledge with real world
experience. You can learn as much, or more, from your presenter’s accounts of hassles
and failures as from the theory they are trying to explicate. Thus this year’s talk on The Illustrative World of Team Fortress 2
could teach a lot about dealing with multiplayer-only title or working with the
Source Engine material editor, as well as offering some general wisdom about
stylized character art. The best talks
teach general principles using real world production as vivid examples,
striking a balance between simple post-mortems on the one hand and pure theory
on the other.
Trying to go very deep is very tough in the typical
hour-long lecture format. If you focus too closely on the precise specifics of
a particular technique or technology you’ll probably lose many of your
listeners in the thickets of details. And if you can’t provide a larger takeaway, you
won’t be able to reach audience members who work in other genres or on other
platforms. A talk about how to use
non-linear animation tools to crank out lots of animations for multiplayer
games, using your online shooter as a case –in-point is going to work a lot better than a talk
about the six months you spent getting everybody to learn the Trax editor in
Maya.
On the other hand, overly broad talks are also weak. It’s a
notorious truth, for example, that every year produces a large number of talks
about art direction. Most of these are
good proposals from serious professionals – but the more broadly these talks
are pitched, the more they will tend to overlap, so inevitably the large number
of proposals gets whittled down to only one or two talks – there’s only so much
room on the program for Grand Unified Theories of Art, no matter how
worthwhile.
On the other hand, a talk about creating art direction for
international products, with special reference to a porting a popular Korean
game to the US, a primer on doing historical costume research as shown in a
Renaissance themed adventure game, and a third talk about the special
challenges of creating a visual direction for DS games can all coexist
happily.
Focus
Working in an
esoteric business like ours can be lonely. Every veteran game artist has a
closet full of favorite tactics and war stories to share, and an audience full
of the only people in the world who have any idea what you’re talking about is
a standing temptation to cram every tip and trick of your career into your
Powerpoint. Unfortunately, that grab-bag
approach may make good fodder for a bull session on the suite party circuit (or
maybe not, as many GDC afterparty vets can attest… but we digress) but it’s murder
for a GDC talk.
Verbal presentation
is a much less efficient medium than print or the web; to really reach
an audience effectively you need to make sure that your points are clearly
marshaled an mutually reinforcing, and that means your talk outline needs to be
clearly structured , well thought out presentation of your points and not just
a laundry list. Talk proposals with good
topics and interesting speakers often fail to make the grade if they come with
fuzzy or incomplete outlines – just as in high school English, coming up with a
strong outline is the key to success both in the submissions process and in
crafting a popular talk. Fortunately, a good takeaway and the strong hook will
both nudge the proposal towards a clear, well focused structure.
Credentials
If you haven’t given a GDC talk before, landing a speaking
gig is more challenging. First-time speakers confront the same catch-22 that maddens first-time
job seekers: without any experience,
it’s hard to convince people to let you earn experience. Unsurprisingly, audiences and reviewers are
attracted by well known names and high profile titles. If you have had the good luck to work on a
high profile franchise (or better yet, a big hit from the last year) your
proposal will have a big leg up over an equally good submission from an eager
but obscure competitor. This probably
means some good talks don’t get accepted, but it does reflect the preferences
of the audience.
Naturally, if you’ve given a successful talk at the GDC
before it’s also much easier to get another chance. The GDC carefully tracks
audience responses – fill out those cards, people! – so that earlier talk might
not be such an advantage if the ratings were unimpressive. The ratings are done
on a 5 point scale – if a previous session averaged 3 or under, it’ll be pretty
tough to win a second chance.
If your resume isn’t studded with million sellers, you
should make sure to burnish up any other credentials you may have.
Presentations at other industry shows certainly help, as does experience as a
teacher or writer. If your fear you're
at a disadvantage in the credentials department because you should think about developing
your presentation skills and name recognition. A semester or two teaching at
your local art school or community college game design program can be helpful,
as can a guest spot in Game Developer or other industry publications. In any event if you’re worried about breaking
in the hallowed ranks of GDC presenters, you have all the more incentive to
really hone your proposal into an irresistible pitch.
Why Bother?
If this sounds like a
lot of work, it is. Landing a speakers
badge for the GDC is an accomplishment in itself. You’ll need a well crafted topic, some hard
won personal expertise, and the willingness to get up in front of an audience
of smart, skeptical peers who won’t hesitate to call BS. Is it really worth it?
Well, the practical benefits for your career are obvious – if you make a name for yourself as a presenter you’re going to have a big leg up in future job searches. As a side benefit, you’ll become a Jedi master of whatever subject you set out to speak on – no matter how well you knew it when you clicked the “send” button on your proposal, a few months of slide-crafting and run-throughs will force you to know the subject far, far better than you thought possible.
Even with all purely personal benefits, pinning on the lav
mic and facing the crowd is also a real service to the community. Older professions have a pretty good sense of
what it means to be a member of the club – if you’re a lawyer or an accountant,
you have a pretty clear idea of how you can expect your work life career to go.
In our young (not to say “infantile”) business those expectations are much more
fluid and are still evolving . Stepping into the spotlight for a few minutes is
helping to define those expectations for yourself and for your peers. What does it mean to be a “game artist?”
You’re helping us all to figure it out. If that comes with a tote bag, so much
the better.
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