GDC lacked the intimacy of previous years, but this annual gathering is still the epicenter of excitement and creativity. Courtesy of the Game Developers Conference (left). Photo credit: M. Alamares

You can count on the Game Developers Conference as being an epicenter of excitement and creativity, and this year’s event was no exception. More than 10,000 attendees raced down the hallways of the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, trying to figure out which of three or four simultaneous sessions they wanted to attend. You got the sense that games might seem trivial to the public outside, but from the earnest, shining faces and the evangelical tones of the crowd inside these hallowed halls for five days, you got the sense that gaming was not just a technology, but an art and a lifestyle — this is what really mattered.

This year’s show in San Francisco lacked some of intimacy of the much smaller San Jose Convention Center; look for the GDC to return to San Jose next year. The show started with two days of Serious and Mobile Games —two new gaming areas that are experiencing tremendous growth. The main show continued for three days, with a show floor and dozens of panels on every possible facet of gaming creation.

The GDC is about game production — it is very different from its cousin, the E3 expo, with its huge booths and budgets, although the differences seem to decrease somewhat every year. The E3 show is about suits and sales, and marketing presentations to retailers about why they should buy the latest version of a console game. The GDC still honors its roots, the days when small groups of fanatics could turn out a cool game on a credit card budget in three months. Most new console games now cost more than $5 million, and are produced by giant gaming companies such as THQ or Sony, but you can still glimpse the original traditions — colorful T-shirts and wild hairdos are standard, casual is in, Armani suits are frowned upon, and discussions of the coolness factor of a game still outnumber considerations of profitability.

The biggest surprise winner at the Choice Awards was the nonviolent Katamari Damacy, created by the softspoken Keita Takahashi, a sculptor-turned-3D-artist. © 2004 Namco Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Awards: Which Games are the Best?
So what was hot and new at GDC 2005? The International Game Developers Association’s Gamers Choice Awards are the Oscars of the gaming community, and reflect what the gamers themselves think are the best games available. The most talked about games at the show were the big-budget Halo 2 (Bungie/Microsoft), Half-Life 2 (Valve/Vivendi), and World of Warcraft (Blizzard), though Final Fantasy XII, Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Doom 3 also got a lot of buzz.

The biggest surprise was Katamari Damacy, created by the soft-spoken Keita Takahashi, a sculptor-turned-3D-artist at Namco. No shooters or ninja warriors can be found in this game — the player assumes the role of Prince of All Cosmos and rolls around a ball of sticky debris (called a Katamari). As you roll over more objects, the ball gets bigger and bigger, like a snowball rolling down a hill.

The winners of the IGDA awards this year were Half-Life 2 (Best Game), Far Cry (New Studio), Halo 2 (Best Audio), Half-Life 2 (Character Design), Katamari Damacy (Game Design), Half-Life 2 (Technology), World of Warcraft (Visual Arts), Half-Life 2 (Best Writing) plus Donkey Konga, I Love Bees and Katamari Damacy (Most Innovative).

In the spirit of egalitarianism, there were also awards for independent (that is, low budget) games, in the spirit of the Sundance Film Festival.

GISH won the Open Category of games, while WIK captured the Web/Downloadable grand prize, netting each of the game development teams $15,000.

One of the GISH developers from Chronic Logic ran through his acceptance speech, saying, “I-want-to-thank-everybody-that-worked-on-this-game-and-I-would-like-to-propose-to-my-girlfriend.” The camera cut away to show the girlfriend in the audience jumping around wildly (she accepted). The next winner wryly commented that he wanted to thank his wife for not leaving him during the ordeal of creating the game.