Advisory Board Message

The GDC Advisory Board has made improving the quality of presented talks its number one goal. The quality problem historically has been the gap between the talk abstract and the presented lecture, and we are trying to fix that. If you just look at the show program from any given year, it is pretty awesome, and although any individual might pick a different set of talks, the chosen talks are representative of interesting and current work happening in game development each year. However, everyone has experienced this: there's a great title and abstract, but you go to the talk and it's disappointing. This gap is very hard to close, but we're taking it very seriously. We rely on grading history for speakers, but we are increasingly requesting much more complete submissions to help narrow the gap as well, because it allows us to get past the abstract and see the talk itself. This is a major pain for submitters, because it means they have to prepare their content well ahead of the GDC. However, many of the most respected technical and academic conferences require absolutely complete submissions by a hard inflexible deadline very far ahead of the conference so the jury can know exactly what will be presented. We are not at that point with the GDC, but it would guarantee the Advisory Board could pick only the best possible talks. We are trying to balance between inconvenience to the submitter in an industry where publishing and sharing information is important but is not the main part of one's job (as opposed to academia), with this goal to substantially increase the quality of the presented lectures.

Thank you,