GDC: Day 0

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Today was a pretty great day. I had a shift to help with bagging various fliers and pamphlets that will be given to GDC attendees. This was later followed up by orientation and a tour of the three different buildings which make up the Moscone Center. It was a great experience mostly because of my fellow Conference Associates. There were CAs I met who were students like me and others who were professionals actively working in the field.

Some of these professionals included a designer for Blizzard Entertainment who was giving me all sorts of friendly advice for a first-time CA, a former translator for Nintendo who was encouraging me to practice my Japanese, and an employee of tri-Ace telling me about his experience of working in Japan. I loved these conversations! They were so interesting and informative. I also met with students from Berklee College of Music who were working with us SPSU students in the most recent Global Game Jam. You can only imagine how exciting it was to make that discovery!

I passed out a good number of business cards today too, and received a good number in return. I’m glad I decided to bring them today, even though it was just CAs setting up the conference. I was quick to notice how writing down notes about your encounters with various people will greatly help with remembering who they are later. This is something I highly recommend for anyone who attends GDC or a similar event!

Interesting to note, I’ve also been making good use of my Nintendo 3DS’ StreetPass feature to advertise my website and Swapnote to send out my contact information. It’s been well-received by my fellow CAs. Hopefully the trend will continue throughout the week and will also lead to connections on LinkedIn or other social media. Just by observing and talking with other CAs, I can tell that these are people I want to stay in touch with. I can already tell that my fellow CAs will be some of the best connections I can get as an aspiring video game professional.

However, today was just the calm before the storm. Starting tomorrow, GDC will officially start with thousands of people descending upon San Francisco just to attend this event throughout the week. My work schedule looks pretty busy, but at the same time extremely exciting. I’ve been assigned to mostly help with several interesting sessions, some which included “The Art of Journey” by Matt Nava, “Designing Journey” by Jenova Chen, “Storytelling in DC Universe Online,” “Kickstarter Lessons for Indie Game Developers,” and “Breaking in Game Biz!”

I also have a couple of shifts watching over the Speaker Lounge. This job combined with the sessions gives me access to big names in the industry that probably most aspiring game developers dream of having. My main responsibilities are to make sure the speakers’ needs are met and to give the attendees the best experience possible at GDC! I can’t think of a better way of connecting with people and showing them your work ethic.

Tomorrow I’ll be helping with two sessions, “Molyjam: How Twitter Jokes Can Save Video Games” and “The Unfinished Swan: From Student Prototype to Commerical Game” by Ian Dallas. I’m super excited for the session about The Unfinished Swan, but I can’t help but be also interested in what the Molyjam session entails since it involves Twitter. My day starts early tomorrow with the morning meeting all CAs must attend, so I’m off for now!


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