Last Day of GDC. GDC Tried to Kill Us.

My friend Darius Kazemi, who is also amazingly ill, just sent a timely Tweet about what GDC does to a person, as expressed by none other than the Wu Tang Clan:

"[GDC] ain't nuthin' to [expletive] with."

Indeed. I am writing the Day 5 recap many days later because I have been in a coma due to the massive "GDC death flu" (See image to know how we feel) that grabbed me and slugged me around, starting at 3pm last Friday.  My illness has only let up long enough for me to type this out. It is a good thing that I do not have to do the audio feed of this since I have no voice! I know it is not just me that has been taken by GDC, Mark also find the tickle of death in the back of his throat, and was down for 4 days.

Ok, so what happened on that last day of GDC when everyone was completely wiped out? Well, surprisingly, many more people than I had ever expected to attend decided to show up to the 9am talk!  We had an impressively large room and it was full. Of course, it could have been a hallucination due to the zero hours of sleep I had the night before, as I reworked the talk but I was told by the Conference Associates that it was not in my mind. Mark did confirm that there were in fact a lot of people in there, so it must be true, or we are sharing the same tired delusions.

By the way, a special "shout out" to the awesome Conference Associates we had this year, these volunteers are assigned to the speakers to help make sure the show runs as smoothly as possible!

I tend to like to shoot from the hip a bit but with new slides and complete exhaustion; it was rough! This year I had the weirdest speaker experience to date; there was an odd reverb that was causing my words to repeat themselves a second after I had uttered them. Unfortunately or fortunately, only I could hear the echo! Couple that with my own brain rehabbing and trying to get the right sentences out of my head.  Everyone said it was perfectly fine though. Turns out, I was just focused on those words.  It was like a crazy word rollercoaster in my head! 

The very basic talk, which was an introduction to gaming accessibility, provided the audience with 10 ways to get started on game accessibility.  We moved to the next session, which was our annual "meet and greet" session at the IGDA booth. You can never predict how this is going to turn out, who will show, what they will want to talk to us about, etc. This year had me wearing my psychologist's hat on for the rest of the day.

I was speaking to a potential developer who had a psychological disability who was telling me how difficult it is to feel comfortable in a workspace when you are constantly wondering if you might do something that seems "odd." Now we all have our differences, but I know what he meant. Another gentleman came up to me about autism and MMOs as a way to try and help adults with high functioning autism to help assuage feelings of panic in the "real world" so that they can work, form relationships, etc.

So much remains to be done.  If games are not accessible, then how will it ever be a viable career option that will help diversify the industry?  How ready is the industry to provide accommodations?  How do we get potential industry members involved educationally when a disability can rob so many of the ability to work?

After the session, when I was putting down all my things from the morning sessions, I saw something on CNN about a couple with Multiple Sclerosis.  They can no longer get to work, rehab, or anything much beyond their home because of tax cuts removing the transportation options that many elderly, impoverished, and disabled individuals depend on.

Between the collaborations over the years between all the individuals of the IGDA Game Accessibility SIG and amazing groups such as AbleGamers, much has been done. Together, we have been working with developers and consumers.  Now it has started to open up to a much larger world where maybe someday we can help support those gamers because the next generation of game designers and developers will understand the underlying problems. Much work remains. We are nowhere close to stopping!

Michelle Hinn