It’s 20XX and I’m settling into a folding chair at GDC, buzzing with the kind of excitement that only makes sense if you understand what it took to get there. This was my first time at the conference after nearly eight years in the industry. A few colleagues and I had pooled resources and were sharing a single pass between us — trading it off in shifts, each of us making the most of whatever time we had with it. If you’ve ever looked at GDC pricing and felt your stomach drop, you understand. The Top Ramen budget was still very much in effect.
So when I slid into a session I’d been looking forward to, I was genuinely invested. Not just curious — invested. I had given up time with the pass for this. Someone else wasn’t seeing something so I could be sitting in this room.
The speaker arrived a few minutes before start, hastily plugging in his laptop, tapping the mic, calling over to the tech guy in the back — “we good?” He got the thumbs up, launched his PowerPoint, and began speaking at a pace that suggested he had somewhere better to be.
It became clear very quickly that he had no real intention of sharing anything. The talk was scheduled for thirty minutes. He finished in fifteen. He had opened with something along the lines of “I was told I was required to speak for fifteen minutes” — which, to his credit, was at least honest. Seventeen minutes after it began I was outside looking for my colleague to hand off the pass, trying to figure out what I had just watched and why it had bothered me as much as it did.
It took me a while to put words to it. But I think what bothered me was this: he knew things. Genuinely useful things, probably. And he had decided, consciously or not, that the room didn’t really need them.
It’s Not Just A Game Dev Problem
I want to be careful not to make this a pile-on of GDC or the games industry specifically, because this isn’t a games industry problem. I’ve sat through versions of this talk at pop culture conventions, at professional development events, at panels that were pitched as explorations of something genuinely interesting and turned out to be thirty minutes of someone enthusing about their favorite thing to an audience that came expecting to learn something. The packaging changes. The experience is always the same — you walked in curious and you walked out feeling like you missed something, except there was nothing to miss because nothing was offered.
The bad versions tend to have a few things in common. They’re case studies with no transferable principles — here is exactly what we did on this specific project with these specific tools, presented with no acknowledgment that your situation is different in every meaningful way. Or, they’re cheerleading sessions — this discipline is important, this genre matters, this community is special — that feel good to deliver and leave the audience with nothing actionable. Or they’re like that GDC talk: technically competent, communicatively absent, there in body but not in any spirit of generosity toward the people in the room.
What all of these have in common is the same thing: the speaker is thinking about themselves. Their expertise. Their project. Their enthusiasm. The audience is incidental.
What The Good Ones Do
The talks worth sitting through — and they exist, I’ve been in those rooms too — tend to share a different quality. They teach theory, not just practice. They offer something transferable, something that travels beyond the specific context it came from and lands usefully in your own work. They dare to challenge a status quo or ask a question the audience hadn’t thought to ask yet. And almost always, the person delivering them has a genuine ease with communication — not performance, not polish, but actual comfort with the idea that there are other people in the room and those people came here for something.
Teaching requires you to think about the other person. Performing only requires you to think about yourself. That distinction sounds simple but it changes everything about how you prepare, how you structure what you’re saying, and what you consider a successful outcome. A successful performance is one where you felt good about what you said. A successful lesson is one where someone left knowing something they didn’t before.
The best speakers I’ve seen treat the audience as collaborators in the idea — not passive recipients of expertise but people who are going to take whatever is offered and do something with it. That relationship changes the energy in the room. It changes what gets said and how. And it almost always produces something more interesting than a speaker performing competence at a room full of people who already assumed they were competent — that’s why they showed up.
Why It Matters
Knowledge that doesn’t get shared generously doesn’t travel far. It’s tribal. It stays with the person who has it, maybe gets passed to a few people in their immediate orbit, and then largely stops. Meanwhile everyone else in the industry — the people sharing passes, stretching budgets, trading shifts at the door of a conference they saved up to attend — keeps figuring things out the hard way.
There’s a version of expertise that exists to impress. And there’s a version that exists to multiply. The first one feels good in the moment and leaves almost no trace. The second one is harder, requires more of the person delivering it, and is the only one that actually matters.
Nobody came to watch you know things. They came to learn something. Those are different jobs, and only one of them is worth showing up for.