Game Developers Conference 2010, As Told To Twitter

What was everybody (on Twitter) talking about during this year’s GDC? Game researcher Jesper Juul offers his annual look at the most tweeted highlights from the week of GDC, during which “pocket protector” was a surprisingly hot topic.

Back from Game Developers Conference 2010 and trying to get my bearings like everybody else.

On the heels of my twitter map of GDC 2009, here is a word frequency map of this year’s conference. I think they give a decent picture of what was going on if you weren’t there.

Monday: Day before GDC

Anticipation before the conference starts.

Tuesday: Tutorial and summit day 1

Social games loomed large, as did FarmVille, the iPhone, and indie games.

Wednesday: Tutorial and summit day 2

While social games and tutorials were still happening, this was completely overshadowed by the announcement of the PlayStation Move controller.

Thursday: Day 1 of main conference

The expo floor opens (“booth”), Uncharted 2 is big, and the award show dominates.

Friday: Day 2 of main conference

Sid Meier’s keynote, parties, more expo booths. Harmonix, FarmVille. @pocketprotector wins the prize for most tweets.

Saturday: Final day (3) of main conference

Phaedrus’ aka Will Wright’s “surprise” talk takes a lot of space. Mass Effect.

Sunday: Post-conference

A great time, PlayStation move (again), Gabe Newell, time to go home. “See you guys next year.”

Notes: Thanks to Mike Edwards for providing the captured tweets. I have deleted all occurrences of the quite frequent “game”, “games”, “gdc” and “rt” as they did not add any information. “PlayStation Move” on Wednesday is a 100 times more frequent than I would have guessed from going to the conference. This is probably because we are more likely to tweet news items than casual conversation. Made using Wordle

Jesper Juul has been working with the development of video game theory since the late 1990’s. He is a visiting arts professor at the NYU Game Center, but has previously worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Lab at MIT and at the IT University of Copenhagen. His book Half-Real on video game theory was published by MIT press in 2005. His recently published book, A Casual Revolution, examines how puzzle games, music games, and the Nintendo Wii are bringing video games to a new audience. He maintains the blog The Ludologist on “game research and other important things”.

Reprinted with permission from Jesper Juul.