Zarf Updates

Once again I will show my face in San Francisco for GDC. (My masked face, if you see me inside the convention center. That's how I roll now.) I'll be wearing the Green Hyperspace Jacket as usual.

I've attended GDC on and off since 2012. This year is a first, though: I'll be helping represent IFTF! We'll have a table in the new "GDC Commons" space, promoting the tools and art of interactive fiction. Come visit us during show-floor hours: 10-6 Wednesday, 10-6 Thursday, 10-3 Friday.

The Common will also host a bunch of other regional and interest-based game-dev nonprofits. Including the Global Game Jam, Black in Gaming, Latinx in Gaming, and groups from SF, Seattle, and my own homies from Boston Game Dev. Who I would totally be helping out if I weren't booked with the IFTF crew. And others.

I won't spoil our booth surprises... well, maybe a little. My Visible Zorker project is a great example of an open-source resource for game history education, so it'll be up and running somewhere. Assuming we get all the laptops set up the way we want.

No, I am not hijacking an IFTF event to promote my own Patreon. That would be tacky. But I should have Visible Zork 3 up and running as a special GDC sneak peek...

I won't be in the IFTF space every minute, but I'm signed up for a bunch of table hours on Wed/Thu/Fri. The rest of the week -- you know, the usual GDC cycle. Go to a talk, decide that talks are silly, hang out in Yerba Buena Park with all the other game-dev nerds. (Spoiler: the park doesn't require a conference badge. Drop by whether you're registered or not! It's always a crowd, unless it's raining, and even then.)

Oh, and I'll also be at the IFTF table at the Opening Night Event down at Oracle Park. Monday night, 6:30 until... actually I don't know how late it runs. We will find out!

And now, let's take that headline from top. What are GDC's plans for 2026? What's going on with this event? Why has it rebranded as the "Festival of Gaming"? What does that mean?

Everyone knows GDC started in 1988 as the "Computer Game Developers Conference" -- a couple dozen people in Chris Crawford's living room. Apparently it was 300 people by 1989. By the time I visited, GDC was the 30000-person monstrosity we know and resent today.

Then, splat. Pandemic, argh, skip a couple years, everybody comes back (not everybody)... just in time for three years of unprecedented industry consolidations, layoffs, and closures. Followed by the chilling of international tourism and business travel under, you know, the current way of things.

Not great for your theoretically industry-leading and in practice incredibly-expensive event.

As I understand it, the event's tentpole financial donors (Epic, Unity, Amazon, etc) have now drastically cut their support. Don't quote me on this, it's just what I hear on the street. But the giant reset of GDC's name, its branding, and its price matrix is a clear signal that The Old Plan Ain't Working.

Will the new plan work? 2025 had plenty of butts on-site, despite the industry malaise. Perhaps because of the industry malaise. But you can't run a show this size by shaking down the unemployed.

The "community and networking" theme seems to be aiming for a sort of social-time-with-your-30000-best-friends vibe. With an implicit promise that even though all of your friends just got laid off, their friends are all well-heeled publishers who can hook you right up. I mean, that is GDC in a nutshell, and has been for the past two decades. It's just that the social circle, the thousand overlapping social circles, have been cultivated on the coat-tails of gigantic economic battleships that hung in the sky in exactly the way that bricks don't. Can they really turn that into a self-supporting can't-miss community event? Or does everybody fly centrifugally off to fan-run meetups that cost a twentieth as much?

Don't look to me for predictions. I have an bug's-eye view of all this. Indeed, I'm one of the performing fleas they're bringing in to liven up the circus. IFTF gets free space on the show-floor! I'm happy to take my complimentary exhibitor pass and strut our stuff for a week.

But the sense that I'm getting from everybody is... provisional. "We'll try this new GDC and see if it works." Attendees are saying it and, well, GDC must be saying it too. Renting out the ballpark, good grief. They're just throwing a whole bunch of stuff in the pot and waiting to see if it explodes. With popcorn! Literal ballpark popcorn!

Somewhere behind the curtain is a spreadsheet, and a month from now, the cell in the bottom right will be red or black. I think that very shortly after that, we'll know whether 2026 turns out to be the last GDC.

If so, I am for sure not going to miss the party.