Ep. 331 - Bye Forever GDC 2024, with Brandon Sheffield
Insert Credit reports direct from GDC 2024. Brandon Sheffield asks industry professionals maybe the most important question in the games right now: how do you reclaim your humanity during all this chaos? Hosted by Brandon Sheffield, with Megan Farokhmanesh, Osama Dorias, Amani Shantz, Paweł Rohleder, JJ Signal, Antonio Uribe, Ash Parrish, Mathew Kumar, and Baiyon. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.
I‘d be curious to hear from anyone who went to GDC about the makeup of this year’s event—my outside impression, based on conversations with a few people who were there and whatever brief panel rundowns/clips I‘ve come across, is that there’s an increasingly stark divide between the strictly corporate side of the event and the creative-first events, to the point where it doesn‘t make much sense for a lot of these initiatives to be tethered to GDC, and that anyone who wasn’t being comped would really struggle to justify ever going to GDC if it continues as-is.
I don‘t like “complaining” about audio but I think the background noise removing filter was set a little too aggresive for some parts of this episode. There’s like a weird thing going on with the attack and it sounds like everyone has a slight speech impediment. Part of my job at some point was working with vocal isolating software and I know how easy it is to go a little too far lol
I know Brandon meant Picross and not Pictochat but i do like the idea of every night hanging with your dog and drawing on Pictochat on a Nintendo DS Lite in an empty chat room
@穴 it was a very challenging mixing session this week, and there’s a lot in there that gets sketchy. apologies; i honestly might take another crack at the audio at some point, but there’s a good deal more in queue to handle first
Always enjoy these episodes, as they flow in different ways to the usual show and learn some amazing things about people - like when dogs pee or why washing dishes is theraputic! @exodus did you have a cold at the start of the week? Was that fridge just too cold ;)
@Tom basically I think despite not updating my voice recorder and not changing my mic, I believe my phone is trying to be “helpful” by dampening noise in a way that it didn‘t used to. It sounded aggressively worse than previously despite my generally being in quieter areas. Basically I need a solution for next time or I’ve got to stop doing these!
@exodus Let‘s find a solution then! I for one would miss your interview episodes and I’m sure there's others out there who feel the same.
Are you using the microphone in your phone or an external one?
It's great to hear the music that goes with that photo of Baiyon I saw you post last week.
Also for me it was good timing to hear an episode like this. I was having a bit of a down week, and while it's obviously not good to hear that people are struggling, it's a nice reminder that everyone has some sort of struggle going on, and I recognised a lot of the same difficulties. The simplicity of some of the resetting strategies was also reassuring. Nice!
Great episode! Really therapeutic, and it is a universal topic for not just the video game industry, for sure.
When I think about game flow, relaxation and escapism, I think about the practice of Zen Buddhism and what I thought it was as an outsider and what I learned about it over time. The act of meditation is not an escape or attempt to go somewhere else but instead an act of being fully, truly present. And it's a practice that embraces intentional positive momentum rather than a chill ambivalence.
So what I'd like to open up to discussion is how can players and developers lean into this intentional and positive form of flow in video games rather than as an attempt to escape or distract?
@Tom no crowdsourcing necessary really - my phone is acting as the processing device and is just outputting really low quality stuff, while also trying to process it in ways I can't control. I use an external mic but the phone has decided to do some things to make it sound worse.
What I need is either a field recorder with a nice mic or this thing @sklathill is looking into where the raw recording is stored directly on the mic so nothing is being compressed and then it‘s all on esper’s side and she has more control. Gonna check out some of his experiments before I take the plunge, as either way it will be expensive.
Kumar cut straight to the issue - avoid thinking about ourselves/distracting our senses vs inhabiting our bodies/interacting with the world. And I think the only way to really make yourself reclaim your humanity is to be part of a community, to engage in something with others. For me that means organizing with DSA, one of the few non-familial things that makes everything else in my life feel non-important compared to the work that needs to be done. Build something that aligns with your morals and you feel good. Capitalism's drive towards dispossession will never feel good or natural.
