TE: Having been there and to a number of events, I can get my head around that kind of divide between what happens officially at GDC and what happens in the auxiliary tents. But do you think the average Joe who's maybe catching conference coverage from The Escapist is really going to grasp that difference? I mean, isn't to them anything that happens in San Francisco during the week of GDC sort of part of GDC? And do you guys benefit from that, or does it detract from the show?
JM: I think we benefit from it, and it's not something that we necessarily care to make that dramatic a distinction to the consumer audience about. The main reason I bring it up is because we're focused on our core audience, so when it comes to individual developers we want to make sure they understand that the conference schedule is still kind of sacrosanct. It's still developed with a high sense of editorial integrity, that we run it like a magazine. Every article has to be journalistically sound, if you will.
So for our buying customers, for our attendees that are spending $1500 on a pass, we want to make sure that they get the value that they expect. And the fact that all of this other stuff is going on at the show certainly amplifies the business deal-making side of the story as well. So you get the content you need, and also everyone you need to talk to in order to do the year's worth of business is down the hall, in the same hotel, or in the bar, or attending the same session. You might want to just exchange business cards on the way out.
So it's the best of both worlds really, because you have the highly attractive element of having developers from Nintendo come and speak at the show. It's the kind of thing where you get things at GDC that you would not get at any other event or any other venue in the world. So it becomes the place to be, and then once you have everyone there, it's your job to close the deal.
TE: What can you tell us about maybe the most new and exciting things you're going to be having this year? What's the "feature article," if you will?
JM: Sure ... nice way of putting it. We've always had a vision track, with the idea of bring in people from parallel industries, people to challenge and inspire the game developer audience. One of those people that really exemplifies that is Ray Kurzweil, who is one of our keynotes for GDC this year. He's an inventor, he's someone that has a lot of patents in creating new ways for people to interface with technology. And interfacing with technology has become something of a gold mine for the game industry, or at least a creative wellspring, so that you can bring in a whole bunch of other people who have never played games before.
For example, I'm thinking primarily of the Wii and of Guitar Hero. There's a number of other elements developing in the game industry, for example, there's this brain control technology from Emotive, there's a depth-sensing camera from 3DV, and Ray Kurzweil is going to be talking about a new human-computer interface technology, as well as broader ideas of what culture and technology are going to look like in 20 years. See, our show is mostly about the game you're working on now, and the next game you're working on. So to be able project into the future is a fascinating, amazing thing for us.
John Schappert is doing our Microsoft keynote, and he's going to be talking about all the things that we haven't heard from Microsoft over the last couple years, because they haven't keynoted the GDC in a while. So ... I can't really speak too much about the content of what he's saying, but I can say that GDC keynotes are mutually developed editorial sessions, so we kind of work together on what it's going to be, and I am directing a lot of people to just make sure they're there.
In terms of mechanically what's new at GDC, we have a Worlds in Motion summit, which is ... on Monday and Tuesday of GDC we have a lot of specialized content, because it's really the essential thing to do when the game industry is growing so much that we can't necessarily populate everything in the main conference, but we need to make sure that we provide drill-down attention to emerging areas. And Worlds in Motion refers to virtual worlds, to different ways that online portals are being used for fun.
So we have some Facebook content in there, we have different start-ups that are in and out of the game space. But basically, the game industry has this idea that it's just the core publishers and a handful chosen developers. But the whole breadth of the game industry has been dramatically expanding in the last couple of years, with the advent of independent games - we have an independent games summit - and casual games becoming much more cool to the core of the game industry. And now seeing that Web 2.0 and ... film interests are coming in on the virtual worlds side of things. So, our parameters are getting much larger, and so we're glad to be able to have content that attracts that interest as well.
