GDC Q&A: How to Submit a Talk, Session or Panel to GDC 2024

[Music] thank you welcome hi everybody my name is Ashley Corrigan I'm gdc's conference manager and head of content I hope you've been enjoying GDC showcase so far and I'm really glad that you can join us for this session that we have today we have co-ceo of brace yourself games and co-founder of fair Place fair play alliance Dr Kimberly wall with us Kim is a game designer developer researcher and GDC Advisory Board member and she's here to talk to you a little bit about gdc's submission process and answer any questions you have about what advisors look for in proposals if you're interested in submitting um the GDC 2024 call for submissions for

the Core Concepts program which is our Wednesday through Friday program it's going to open July 11th um it'll be open through August 10th so if you're interested in submitting definitely take those those dates down um and if you have any questions please feel free to raise your hand or drop them in chat and we'll get to as many questions as possible um I think I think that's it I think uh I'll stop talking now and without further Ado I'll let him take it from here awesome thanks Ashley hello everyone thanks so much for joining Happy Morning evening afternoon River you may be hailing from really glad that you could you could make it out for for this session and I'm super excited to be here uh as Ashley said this is this is really your time this is for any of the questions things that have been you know you're just not totally sure about submitting or if maybe you've submitted before and you have questions about the process that

you've been exposed to so far et cetera et cetera like essentially this is all your time so Ashley already gave me a wonderful introduction so I won't bore you with more details about me much more interested in all the questions and things that uh that you have so uh yeah let's jump into that I see there's already a question in the uh in the chat so I'm just going to jump to to that so thank you Rima um asks Reba asks what are the pillars that you look for in a talk which is which is a great question I think that um there's a lot of different ways you can think about a talk what a successful talk looks like but a big piece of it is really how it serves the audience and who you see as your your target audience so depending on to what section you submit so I've been on the advisory Council now for a long time I don't really remember 2015 or something anyway it's been a while I'm on the programming one so I have I have a background in both programming and design although I've not done specific reviews I've

helped out a tiny bit here and there on the game design side but most of what I've done has been on the programming side but the process and how you think about a good talk the bones of a good talk are generally generally the same so when I say it really matters about your audience you really want to think about first of all who is your audience where are you submitting if it's a programming audience you're going to skew things one way if it's a design audience production audience so on and so forth you really want to think about who's going to be in the room when you're submitting a talk you do have an opportunity to say something about your anticipated audience as well so are you skewing this towards someone who's a little bit um you know been in the career or a lot been in this space a long time they've had a long career here or maybe they're a little bit newer or maybe this is a talk that is of interest to programmers and designers so on and so forth so you have an opportunity to shape a little bit more but once you've identified with that core audience is then you really want to build out what the key takeaways are I think that's the probably the most important pillar is when people come to

your talk afterward what are they going to take away what's what are the things that by learning this today they can do things differently tomorrow because a lot of what GDC is about is as practical methods is really helping equip and Empower developers with the skills and knowledge that you bring via your talk so that they can take those away and apply them in in their areas so knowing your audience making sure you're being really really clear as to what you need those takeaways to be focusing those takeaways it can be very easy to kind of put everything in the kitchen sink in there there's a lot of stuff I'm sure you can share you've all done a number of different interesting things but I think you really want to kind of figure out what is that steel thread of the talk you know if you could there's one takeaway that people have it's this and then you have these supporting takeaways that go around that so really focusing really focusing on that and then the other one is just you know this is less maybe a pillar and

more like a good practice would be everything that goes into the talk you really want it to contribute to upholding those goals they should be if it's not directly delivering uh one of to one of those goals so let's say I'm giving a talk on how to design great AI NPCs for for a game and maybe the thing that I really want to get across is something to do with um since this is AI based something to do with how AI uh contributes to that maybe you want to add focus on replayability so replayability is my key theme as it relates to AI NPCs then everything I add to that talk I'm going to be asking how does this support directly or indirectly my key points about replayability with AI and NPCs so really having that discipline to hold yourself accountable to go back and ask yourself does this is this doing enough is this chunk of my talk worth it is it's pulling is it pulling its weight in

in here so those are kind of things the audience the core takeaways and then ensuring that every piece that goes in there is really supporting those those takeaways in a meaningful way uh I see Nina has a question what criteria get an automatic rejection in a proposal that's a tricky one I mean I think we we try to never be Cavalier with what we're reviewing so we don't want to look at things and just go ah it's out of here things that would get like close to an automatic rejection would be a proposal that doesn't have enough content you know I think you're you're given a lot of space to express what you would like to do and there's kind of two different types of ways in which you can describe your talk or two different sort of audiences one is we ask you to describe the talk as if you were describing it to the audience so your future potential attendees this is the talk description you would like and kind of fleshing out those ideas but the other piece and this

is really critical is the piece where you talk to us directly those of us who are going to be reviewing these talks and those that's where we want a lot of detail that's probably where we see the biggest missteps is people will put kind of the same thing in both sections like here's what you would advertise to potential attendees and then they kind of just carbon copy that for us but what we want in this section is not not the sort of marketing speak come to my talk it's going to be cool which is good it's good to attract an audience and to Hype it up we want the nitty-gritty details of what are you actually going to talk about so if you are doing a talk on replayability for for NPC AI NPCs we want to know what you know about that what points you're going to be making and why you think they're crucial to that talk what you think the deliverables part of me the takeaways will be for the attendees and how you're going to be delivering those takeaways

so on and so forth so like really getting into detail there don't be thinking about like oh this is way too much no one's going to want to read this oh we do we really want to read it please give us the details because that since you can't be in the room with us and we can't ask you questions this is our best insight into into what you're thinking and what you're going to bring to to the talk so I think that's that's the main thing there's very rarely an automatic reject I mean you know if someone submitted a spoof or something like that sure but we do try to give everything its due diligence and even when people are light on details we'll still try our very best to tease out and understand what's the potential of this talk where could it Go and sometimes if if we think there's good potential we'll even you know when we get to the next round we'll we'll reach out to people and say hey can you give us some more details if we really think there's something meaningful there and that's an important thing let me

just before I'll take the next question in a moment but let me just say as well if you're not very familiar with the process let's say you've never submitted before there's a few different stages to it so the first is like Ashley said the the submissions window will open up July 11th it goes through to August 10th so this is when you'll be filling out our form and getting all those juicy details together and you know trying to do your best to convey as much as possible what you would like to talk about and what you think the outcomes and value will be to the audience after that then it goes into a review phase where we will look over all of the submissions and all of them we look at everything there's a lot it takes it takes a good chunk of time and we go through everything we read everything in detail if you submit other talks that you have done or anything supporting something we'll go look at all of that like we really try to spend our time going over things and and giving everything a fair shot we then all get together at in person and we talk through after doing that

whole review process we talk through the talks that we think are show the most promise we'll even highlight ones that as I mentioned like ah there's not enough quite here but I think this could be really good we'll flag those so that we can follow up with people and so we'll what we'll do is at the end of that big huge session uh is we will come up with a list of talks that we want to move on to the next phase so the next phase is when we contact you and say hey you've been accepted into phase two which means that we like what we see we think there's a really cool potential talk here we're excited to work with you to hone that into a uh as tight a version of this proposal as possible so we'll give you all the feedback that we have that we've gathered from all of our colleagues in this space we'll give that to you we'll give you a pretty good chunk of time it's usually I can't remember actually it's like six weeks or something four to six weeks how

much do we need to give for the first round uh revisions it's like about four weeks four weeks okay so it's a pretty good chunk of time and you're given the feedback you're given a mentor so it could be me for instance I'll work with you to help interpret the feedback and apply the feedback uh and then you can as I say hone that into to the proposal that you that you think it uh needs to be sometimes during that phase we'll ask you to produce a little bit more concrete details so it could be like a really detailed outline it could be some slides it kind of varies depending upon the the needs and your experience level if you've done this before that sort of thing and at the end of that period if we all feel good that yes we've really got this to a good spot this feels like it's ready you know the talk won't be done at the end of this but we all feel we have very high confidence that the remaining steps between now and GDC you'll be able to get this into an excellent form and we'll still be there

to support so if we feel that's true then that's when we'll accept the talk formally and move it on to an official official acceptance so there's those those few different phases there's the submission window there's our review window there's if we accept to the next phase where we let you know you have the feedback you have some time to respond and and refine your proposal and then there's the window that goes from there to GDC where you're actually preparing the the form will talk and so we're available there too so like this this past GDC for example some of the folks that I were mentoring I was watching their talks repeatedly giving them feedback and coaching them so there's a lot of opportunities there to get additional additional support uh let's see uh Jesse asks how much are previously similar talks from years past considered when evaluating new talk would a talk that is maybe 70 similar to a talk by a previous Dev three to four years ago face a tougher road to acceptance than one that might be less fleshed out but in a more unexplored

topic uh really good question yeah it's there's not like a hard science to this one of the things that we try to look for is if there is if there is a talk on this topic um previously is it still relevant is it still something that you know today we would point to and say that's the talk on this topic go watch that topic if that's true that this is still holding up then we're much less likely to accept them something that has a high overlap with that just because we're kind of doubling up on content and it's probably less valuable to our audience overall now where we draw that line uh it can be sticky right sometimes if it's a very complex topic like let's say I don't know a really complex programming topic that there are some pre-existing talks on but you know at the end of the day it's still just it could use some additional uh perspectives or or ways of

articulating this topic then we'll we'll consider that it might still be worth adding another talk on that on that topic as a result um if it overlaps too much though you know we start to start to feel like it's probably not going to be worth it if it overlaps some but is adding some new content like maybe it is um you know some new state-of-the-art approaches or it's maybe the same kind of foundational materials but it takes things in a different direction then uh if that shows promise and we think there's a space for that in the upcoming event what we might do is accept that to the next phase but then work with you to refine it a little bit just to be able to say hey here's this existing talk uh we think it kind of covers this much so you can kind of reference it and say if you want to a more in-depth Foundation go here and then we can help work with you to flash out your more unique contributions as well too to find a a better balance there

uh would a startup really benefit from presenting at GDC um it kind of depends some really noisy airplane flying by I apologies if you can hear that I'll test how good the noise canceling is um yeah would a startup benefit it I mean it really depends so I think there's a lot of different sources of value for presenting at GDC one obvious one is of course you're contributing to the game development community and sharing your knowledge and I think that is awesome you know a rising tide floats all boats being able to share these techniques allows us to all do our jobs better and to push the state of the art and make better games and support players better and all these wonderful things that come out of knowledge sharing on the flip side like what do you get out of it uh I think there's there's a few different things one is uh it could be a personal goal like public speaking is is a great accomplishment it can be something you want to work toward you want to improve on perhaps GDC is

something that you've you've always enjoyed and you have aspired towards speaking at GDC and so this is a bit of a career goal for you I know at one point that was true for me you know over the years I've given a lot of a lot of talks actually nowadays again doing this a long time but you know earlier on when I hadn't yet spoken at uh at GDC I was really excited to have that opportunity and it was something I wanted to work toward so it was a very personal goal for me in in that regard for a startup though it can be exposure now the point of GDC is not to push a brand it's not to sell things you know there's there's sponsor sessions for that and so if this is really more about no no I want the world to see what my startup is and what we do and potentially work with us you probably want to look more at a sponsor session um that's to to go back to Nina's question earlier about getting an automatic rejection uh sometimes what we'll do is if we think something is sponsored content so you are selling something

or we interpreted as selling something uh then we would recommend instead a sponsor so we would reject it from the main core part of the conference but we may recommend a sponsored session instead um so yeah so if you're selling something it should go over in a sponsored section if you are teaching us something so if you're teaching us about a technique or you know something that any game developer who kind of works in this space would drive value from then there's probably a reasonable chance that we would uh we would consider it and you get the benefit of being known as having greater expertise in this area you get the benefit of a well-publicized talk that you can reference in the future or so on and so forth so I think the the value can be quite varied but it's sort of trying to understand what is really your goal with putting together this this talk is it more on the salesy kind of getting your brand out there which case probably probably

not a good fit unless you want to consider a sponsored session if it's really more about no we want to get this knowledge out into the game development world and share that with our our fellow game developers then yeah absolutely we would we would welcome it awesome I don't see any other questions does anybody have any other questions you want to drop in or raise your hand if not I have some questions of my own but if you don't mind asking Kim I'll I'll shoot at you um oh yeah we've got one more in the chat let me let me grab this one and then let's bounce over to those yeah just came in hot off the presses oh there we go yeah so all right so Peter asked what's your extensive experience as a game developer and GDC Advisory Board member what are some common misconceptions about the proposal process that you'd like to debunk to help first-time applicants submit stronger proposals great question yeah

um I think so one I kind of I already mentioned a little bit was that confusion between how you present your talk as if it would be uh you for potential audience or potential attendees versus what we behind the scenes really want to see I think so often I see those get conflated where we don't really get details we get kind of the sales pitch marketing version of the talk and that just doesn't give us any any details so I think that is uh that is a really really big one that I bump up against a lot um another is sometimes I think there's uh things tend to be presented in the application process in a very high level way so even though you're getting giving maybe a lots of bullet points and yes it's very different than what the attendees would would see in a description in the future it's still very high level it's not really

telling us what's special or unique about this knowledge that you want to bring to to GDC like help us really understand why this material is going to be valuable for for the attendees you know what what is it that is unique about this make those connections for us because otherwise we're left to guess at it and at the end of the day there's only so much you know we can do with the material that you give us so the more you connect those dots for us and really spell out why we think this is value why you think this is valuable the easier it is for for us to assess that um so I think that's that's another common thing is sometimes I think there's just a a conception that oh well I just need to give a bunch of bullet points and I I've got it the other thing is uh don't be afraid to really spell out your talk as well too like give me the talk outline in a lot more detail you know this I'm going to intro here and talk about these few things then this section is going to be

about here and I'm going to make these points and I'm going to support these points with XYZ and then I'm going to make these points and x y z and then I'm going to close out and I'm going to round out with a summary of the key takeaways which are these things uh and like give me that outline the other misconception I often encounter is it so it is a lot of work to submit to GDC I won't lie you've got to do your homework you've got to have a solid grounding of what you would like to speak about um don't just toss it in a rough idea there's a tiny chance that if we're really desperate for content of that sort and maybe you're really established speaker and we're like maybe we could come back and ask you to flesh out we're still going to come back and ask you to flesh it out uh maybe but it's 99 sure that something that's lightweight it's just it's not going to be enough and there's going to be plenty more other submissions that are very well fleshed out so it is a chunk of work be prepared for that uh you know part of the reason the window is so long and we give you a month is because you need to take the

time to prepare that um that being said you don't need to have a finished talk you don't need to get everything ready uh prepare all of your slides and link us a complete talk and describe that talk chances are almost certain that we're going to work with you anyway and we're going to bring in additional knowledge about some of the topics we're targeting this year maybe pulling from past talks we know about I mean none of us have complete knowledge of every single talk that has ever happened there's a lot now so you know this is intersection of different experiences that we can use to understand past talks and share that knowledge with you and work with you so you'll end up changing it quite a bit almost certainly so I think that's another kind of misconception is just like how much work is here it is a lot of work but it's not a complete talk uh and so keeping that in in mind as well I don't know Ashley can you think of any other misconception things I feel like there's more and they're not coming to my mind it's a great question this is a great question um

no I think you covered it I think that's you gave a really good overview of it um I'll have a think though and if I think of something then I'll chime in about it awesome thank you uh all right so Ted asks in regards to selling selling something and sponsored sessions does it count as leaning towards sponsored content if you want to talk about a technique you used in making a tool you're selling um yeah that's always kind of a gray area isn't it uh I think that the kind of rule of thumb I use in my mind is uh how does this relate to uh your product and if I would buy this product like if this is a technique you can freely share and I can take this technique for myself and go use it and I don't need to go buy your product to use it then I think it's probably fine like it is a valid use case of knowledge sharing if that knowledge sharing comes with a catch like I really have to use your product then it's probably starting to lean a little bit too salesy at that point

because there's a there's a dependency on being able to use that now you might naturally be asking well we use a lot of software in this industry and so what do you do about that you know like lots of people use Unity lots of people use unreal for example um we debate that a lot that's probably one of the biggest debates that we have is is this sponsored content or is this legitimate I think where we try to skew things is where GDC we want to have is Broad appeal as brown an appeal as possible now that's not to say uh you're getting a programming talk and so therefore every game developer needs to get value out of this no but it should have broad appeal to the subset of the GDC audience that are programmers and so what we tend to bias towards broader appeal so if something is kind of for lack of a better word locked behind some sort of proprietary software than or proprietary method I guess in

some cases uh then that's gonna probably deter us because we know that's going to have a much more limited audience if it's a huge scale like just everyone uses this or a huge portion of the industry uses it then we might still consider it but again if it's still getting into the salesy where like at the end of the day it's really hard to disentangle the sales pitch from the software or the technique or whatever it is that's where we're going to be like hyper focused and making sure we can disentangle that and if we're not sure then we will default to not including it I mean we really really want to maintain that that our our core you know the non-sponsored sessions are are very much about open knowledge sharing as much as possible just kind of I was just thinking um kind of going back to what you were saying I don't know if this is necessarily like a common misconception but one question

um that I've gotten before is how do you know if you have 30 minutes worth of content or 60 Minutes worth of content so we have different formats um that we accept depending on the program that we have which probably back up GDC has three technically three different programs uh there's the Core Concepts program which runs Wednesday through Friday we accept uh lectures panels and round tables proposals on those and then there's also Summits which run uh Monday and Tuesday and those are just lectures and panels that we accept um and then on Friday we have the game career seminar which is also um we accept lectures and panels so um for the lectures uh we have the two formats of 30 minutes and 60 Minutes um and those are the most proposals that we usually see do you have any advice around um whether you know someone should select a 30 minute or 60 Minute and how do they know yeah boy do I great question

um yeah this this comes up a lot it is it can be a hard question so I have I have a few different thoughts on it first is if you are relatively new to speaking you know maybe you've never spoken at GDC but maybe you've never spoken at all which is which is cool I still encourage you to to submit uh but if you're a little bit newer I would definitely steer you toward 30 minutes it is a lot to get up there for if you're not really accustomed to this and speak for 60 Minutes 60 Minutes is a lot of content to produce and it's a lot of content to produce well you know a lot of times there's a I think hmm feeling that well when you start putting together your talk you've got all the stuff comes tumbling out you're like oh I've got all this content I'm never going to fit it in 30 minutes and so 60 Minutes can feel like the easier Target but it's really not the I think what I encourage most people to do is start start by just

getting out what you want to talk about so what is your goal what is your target audience to pull this back to what we were talking about at the beginning what are the key takeaways that you want to have what is the kind of narrative steel thread so you're going to introduce introduce yourself and then you're going to introduce your your point that you want to advance and build on throughout and you're going to build it in these ways and then you're going to tie it up in a nice bow and you're going to summarize the takeaways at the end you know figure out what your narrative structure is and that stuff you know when it comes to the mentoring phase we will help you with if you don't have the the full structure nailed by the time you you submit uh next month that's okay it's more about the content we'll work with you on how to how to deliver that really well but starting with that and just at this point I also used to be a university Professor years ago so if you count lectures then a gazillion more on top of that but in terms of like actual

prepped talks over the years at different events probably over a hundred and I always start in a very similar way of spelling out all of those pieces and then I start dumping in kind of note form what all of I think the key supporting points are until I've got this Big Blob of text that's a huge old mess and then from there I start lifting out pieces and I'll usually at that point start putting them on slides just so I can start to get a spatial sense of the flow and I can drag slides around and move them around and that'll give me a sense of the overall narrative and then I'll try to tighten that up and notice I'm not really saying a lot about the time right now I'm not paying too much attention to that but this is about the time when I start thinking of okay if I'm targeting a 30-minute talk what I really want to try to do is figure out you know and given any two points I could make I want to know which is the most important to my core takeaways the things that I really want people to walk away from and so I'll start stripping it

down stripping it down stripping it down and that exercise of going through that you'll probably do that several iterations but that exercise is really what distills the talk into a really tight talk if you don't have that pressure of trying to figure out a smaller talk it's very very easy to fall into the Trap of just having a lot of kind of extraneous points that aren't really adding a lot and ultimately kind of dilute the overall presentation that you're that you're putting together so 30 minutes ends up being a pretty good window to you can still get a lot of really good stuff in 30 minutes but it's a very good exercise to force yourself to figure out exactly what fits in those 30 minutes and when you get down to the point you're like I'm at 40 minutes this is impossible but yep keep going there's still points you can take out and if you ever take out a point and you feel like oh my whole talk just fell apart like okay well maybe that point has to stay or maybe you're thinking about the talk

the right way so you know don't be afraid to talk with your colleagues uh even your friends who maybe don't necessarily have the the development background that you do but we'll understand a narrative kind of just spelling out for them it's just the exercise of talking it through talking it through again honing it refining it speaking to points more efficiently will help you continue to to focus and understand that now when do you I mean we have 60-minute slots for a reason when do you have that when do you want that um well as I say less as a beginner I think if you're more experienced it's a lot easier you know you've honed those skills to be able to deliver a longer talk with uh more structural integrity and focus end to end throughout that talk but even then I still usually like personally tend to skew to the 30 minutes because I think those tend to be a little bit more digestible for the audience but when I do skew toward a 60 Minute either in my own talks or when I'm working with someone and producing

their talk uh it's because there's there's just there's that much content so it's usually it's usually much more uh technically detailed I don't just mean programming technical in that sense but also it could be a methodology like very technical in terms of how you actually do this and so there's a lot more to build up and you want to spend time with examples and those those just take time time you know in a 30 minute talk you're going to have to rush through those things whereas if you have a little bit more time sometimes really fleshing those out or if you have some videos to show and whatnot that can make a lot of sense but I would try to stay very disciplined and and constantly interrogate and reinterrogate yourself do I actually need 60 minutes because most of the time 30 minutes is probably the right size and even then I would try to figure out how you get it you know apply apply the rule of what would this look like as a 20-minute talk and then pull

back in the things to really like that way you can be very very intentional about like surgical Precision inserting things back into really hold up and and land that talk solidly uh let's see where are we Elizabeth asked do you accept previously presented talks at other conferences or do you prefer to be the first yeah we don't usually I can't remember Ashley do we have a rule that says we can't I feel like we just don't normally don't yeah correct yeah we um it needs to be original content it can't be presented somewhere else but I think that it's fine to build off of a previous presentation um if you're able to do that uh but uh like you mentioned it needs to be something new something uh that you're really bringing like new to to the GDC community in order to be accepted thank you yeah yeah and we'll go watch those sometimes because uh yeah sometimes there's clearly it's certainly been I've been in conversations where we've gone and watched a talk and we've

been like yeah we can't take the exact same talk but I can see another talk in here that might be really interesting and so we'll you know potentially if it's something that we think would really fit with the programming that we're building out for the year then we might follow up and say hey would you be interested in submitting a talk that focuses more around these things so it's it's more original content yeah great question uh Rima how do you work around references and talks that might negatively or positively reference one of your sponsors or other gaming companies the speaker doesn't work for ah yes diplomacy uh that can be challenging for sure sometimes there's just things that you can't talk enough about to build a coherent narrative and if that's the case then you know it's probably not a really good fit we've had times for example where uh We've accepted to talk we've worked with the speaker and at the last minute they're like actually I have to redact all of this and we're like cool there's no talk left so that can happen and one of the things

we encourage people to do is as early as possible like if you're thinking about submitting a talk now now's probably a good time to start having the conversation with your company and stakeholders about any restrictions on the content to avoid situations like that but in terms of sort of how nonetheless there's going to be a lot of things that you could talk about that you want to be conscientious about what light you you cast them in particularly if they're a sponsor or whatnot um I think there's ways to approach that generally I would say uh if you can try to abstract it don't mention the sponsor lift out what is the key learning you know if it's um working with uh I don't know now I'm drawing blanks but if it's working with a particular piece of software and in your mind you're like it's you know company ABC's software is that very specific to company ABC or is it more like okay when we're talking you know let's say you're in production

and you're talking about project management software you know and you're like as jira totally thinking about jira there you don't have to necessarily talk about jira it might be the sort of thing where you can talk about the software more generically in terms of how it represents tickets and workflow and you know do you do if you do Agile as a kanban is it you know whatever so I think if you can abstract it away that's fine uh and so if you're critical then I would just be mindful of not pointing not pointing fingers the other thing as well too is I just I always encourage everyone to keep this in mind if you're talking so this is less so about like proprietary or companies that sort of stuff and more just generally uh talking about development uh just always be compassionate too you know if you're talking about something that didn't work you know it was an experiment it failed it was a result of a mistake the GDC is not about showcasing mistakes it's about showcasing learnings and doing so in a

respectful and compassionate way we all have made plenty of mistakes I know I've made plenty of mistakes I will go on to make plenty of mistakes as will you all are as will you offer to me but a big part of GDC is coming together as a community to to learn from these things and it takes a lot of Courage of course as as some of you may already be aware or are aware now and just in contemplating a submission to get up on that stage and and share your story and sometimes when you're on that stage you have the the honor and responsibility of sharing a story that's bigger than you this maybe isn't just your experience but it's the experience of you and a team you know or other colleagues that you may have worked with so I think carrying that compassion forward to them as well when you are building your narrative and thinking about how to represent things you know frame it in terms of learning uh don't you know resist the Trap of oh if they'd only just done this you know decisions are always made as a product of the context at the time and we weren't exactly there

we don't know the full story of why those decisions were made exactly there may be information we're not aware of or even if we were there that we're not aware of and either way even if you're like yeah but in this case really did screw it up it's still I think better to take an approach of of respectfully talking about the learnings not pointing fingers and remembering that the goal here is to teach others uh and give them good takeaways rather than to you know relitigate past decisions or point fingers or you know otherwise uh I think uh blame others for past things so yeah that's kind of how I would frame frame things on on the whole and I just I want to underline that point that you made to Kim so about um getting Studio of course someone's in the kitchen right now I don't know if you can hear that but um it's really important to get Studio PR legal approval

um hopefully prior to submitting uh because that's part of the reason why we have this phase two process or why it's really helpful is that we see a lot of ones like the content starts to flesh out we see a lot of talks actually have to be canceled because the speaker didn't get approval prior to submitting or starting to put together the presentation it's really heartbreaking to announce a talk and then have to cancel it um so yeah definitely definitely highly recommend or I'd really encourage people folks to to get approval prior to submitting yeah yeah absolutely and remember I see your your addendum there as well an example of a patent that generated tremendous negative Community response in regard to an AI software that patents by a specific company so again I would probably if you could genericize that to talk about the the challenges faced around um AI software generative AI software if that's the sort of thing that you're talking about without pointing without

pointing fingers but it also the other thing I would keep in mind too is it's GDC talks aren't they're rarely an opinion piece they're much more about practical takeaways and so always asking yourself is a good filter of like what what is really the Practical takeaway here we sometimes do kind of yeah we'll do like uh classic post-mortems which are a little bit more narrative and so there's there's there are times when it is appropriate to tell a story and that story is itself a key learning but I I think really trying to focus on uh what do you want the audience to take away is this more about me wanting to vent about a particular thing that I've seen in which case yeah it's probably not the right venue for that or it's just more about you know what there was a really good learning here and I want to make sure that others are aware of that or the very least they're aware of the the

complexity you know the hereby dragons uh kind of aspect of like you could see other companies going down a similar route and that's a key learning and this might be complicated and more thorny than you realized awesome lots of really great information Ken this has been incredible um we still have 17 minutes so if anyone has any other questions please feel free we could also talk about uh tips around putting together a successful presentation itself and how to how to structure that Kim if you're up into that yeah yeah absolutely uh I think there's there's a lot we could talk about there in terms of creating a a talk and if people have specific questions about that I'm happy to feel those those two but I can talk a little bit generally about about that

um I already talked a little bit about sort of the bones of how my own process for how I develop talks on the whole and really trying to hold myself accountable to honing it in and finding that steel thread and being very hyper critical about does this play a role in the talk or not because if it doesn't it's out of here get rid of it it's just uh it's not um uh it's potentially diluting the talk now there's still stylistic room for things as well too so I don't think you want to necessarily distill it down to the point where every single word has to be absolutely perfectly positioned to lead up to you know your stunning conclusion I think you want to be able to leave space for your personality to come through as well too and how you like to to speak to things and everyone's going to be a little bit different I tend to be ice cube pretty cheesy I am a bit of a ham bone when I'm giving talks I make silly jokes I look like a twit and it's okay uh that's just my style and and how I like to give

talks and that may work for some it doesn't work for others that may work for some audiences it doesn't work for audiences but knowing who you are because you can best be you that's the thing you can do better than anything else on stage is be yourself and it's something that you can you've got lots of practice on so even if you're not necessarily comfortable speaking in front of others uh setting a goal of getting closer and closer to your true self is something that is is a lot more attainable so thinking about that in terms of your talk do you want to work a little bit of humor in is that something you're comfortable with you don't have to and certainly if you're like oh I don't know about that I would say don't worry about it it's there's no need for that you don't have to add that in maybe that's something you want to Aspire toward in a future talk but still think about the ways in which your personality comes through and how you can capture that in in the talk because that will help your audience connect with you a little bit more as a person and that helps a lot it will also help you connect with the material a little bit more you know it

sort of starts to feel a little bit more natural to be speaking to this when it's captured in a way that reflects your personality and and how you like to to communicate uh now how do you get there what does that actually look like well it's not just of course producing the talk slides and being like okay I'm done you've got to practice you've got to hone those those skills you know after years and years and years of giving talks maybe you don't do that much like again and again practicing of a specific talk I can tell you from experience that eventually you get to a spot where particularly if it's a topic you speak on a lot uh you get to a spot where you can pretty confidently deliver the material after you put it together and you don't need to do a whole bunch of trial runs but early on especially when you're new to speaking that is that is invaluable or maybe it's a talk where you really want to make sure you nail all the details maybe then you'll do a little extra extra prep but I'm guessing for probably most people in this audience

you maybe haven't done that much speaking maybe none at all and so how you practice is really important too uh from right from the earliest time that you start putting together some some notes creating some space where you can just speak through those points and I don't just mean reading them out but I mean talking to them trying to get yourself comfortable with the idea of taking a concept and producing something that you're comfortable you know something that you're comfortable articulating about that point so there's two ways to really kind of think about a talk and how you prep it so one is that way so you're really you're building out a set of points that you can speak to and you speak to those dynamically on the fly so more like what I'm doing right now I don't I'm not looking at any particular notes I don't have I haven't written a script I'm not following a script you can probably tell by the way I'm talking and I slip up a bit here and there like it's just not not coming from a script that can and no

judgment maybe I'm totally wrong here but that can be a lot more engaging as hopefully this session is not sure uh but it does it does it's harder right I have to be in the moment I have to be generating things and I might get to things where I'm like like for example uh asking can you can you resubmit a talk I was like I can't remember if we have a formal rule around that so there's things where you know you might you might hit things where you're not necessarily exactly in your comfort zone and so being comfortable with with that is is really the goal so that's one way and that's I think something to build towards uh but I think you can still give really good talks where you write out your script a little bit more or formally so for example uh the example I was giving earlier about the replayability AI talk maybe you do write out all of your key points uh in a fair amount of detail and then you practice reading those out and getting a better command of them so that you are able to

speak to it a little bit more naturally kind of a more advanced technique that I encourage people to at least be aware of and think about is why does it sound differently when you're reading from something versus when you're doing something on the fly like what is it about that is that is different and a lot of it comes from a lot of subtle ways in which we articulate things so the timing of things is a little bit different the emphasis on things is a little bit different and so the more aware of those things you are and you can get more aware of these things by watching talks that you enjoy so going back through the GDC GDC Vault and watching popular talks the more you can start to look for those things and then try to factor them in through through additional additional practice so this all takes time you know this is not something you're going to overnight be good at my first an anecdote from my own life the very first time I had to give a like a talk talk at a conference was uh many many years ago

I had an academic paper and I was speaking at an academic conference and I was so nervous oh my gosh it was a very short talk Maybe 15 minutes or something or so and it was some I don't remember it was some AI thing that I had worked on as an undergrad and I was so nervous I finished that talk in under two minutes despite having practiced this 15-minute talk repeatedly I finished it in under two minutes so you know it's a it's a journey you will get better over time and that's totally okay but the more you practice the thing that I didn't do is practice in front of other people so I practice all by myself all the time and then when I was in front of people I was like oh god what have I done so find someone you're comfortable with if I'm your Mentor I'd be happy to be that person and create a safe space and we can work on it together but really do focus on that practice piece and it'll also help you hone it as well because the more you talk through it the

more you're like oh that didn't really build as well there as I wanted or that didn't feel as natural and so going through those things repeatedly develops that muscle helps improve your talk and gives you more confidence going out onto the stage in in the future uh yeah Neil mentions uh Toastmasters Toastmasters can be can be great I've never personally done it but I know people that have done it and it's uh it's exactly that it's lots of practice being able to get up in front of of people and speak to various different topics which is is the best you can you can hope for for that kind of practice I feel like I got very lucky in my career because I spent 10 years as a professor which meant many times a week I had to get up in front of a large group of people and essentially give a talk and that very quickly honed uh you know improved my skills I won't say it's honed I have lots to learn lots I can improve in in my own public speaking but it certainly helped me get over that that fear and get to a point where you

know I really really enjoy public speaking now it is a fun exercise to try to articulate something and craft a narrative and meet the audience where they're at and respond to to the audience so I think anyone can get there with time and practice but just be compassionate and hold yourself accountable to a level it's more in line with where you're at in in your career and keep these these few techniques in mind and then when we do offer you mentorship support take us up on that we're totally happy to spend plenty of time with you uh practicing practicing these things and building out those those skills yeah I totally agree with all that I mean I I think public speaking for me I used to be terrified of it I still am pretty scared um but it's taken a lot of like time and practice that I'm getting more comfortable with it but I mean it was like as soon as just the idea of speaking in front of people I just my anxiety brain kicks in and I forget

everything I want to say so a lot of a lot of time in practice I mean it just it helps a lot for sure um I have a question actually about um having a co-speaker uh how do you decide when it's appropriate to have a co-speaker or co-speakers um if it's a lecture a panel is a bit different but if you want to submit a lecture and you feel like um you would like to have you know one or two other people up on stage with you when do you think it makes sense yeah so having a cool lecture can be really helpful for a few reasons one can be if the nature of what you're talking about has clear distinct ownership over different pieces so let's say you're talking about some I don't know new technique for gosh my creativity engine is not running today what could it be um I don't know you're making a new co-op game or something let's say and you're talking about design aspects of that you might want to have someone who

specialized on the level design piece speaking a little bit to that and someone who specialized on the character design speaking to that and in those cases it's the the pairing is a lot more natural you know you're having someone who has greater command of the topic who's going to be able to probably be more fluent and more comfortable and so that will in turn result in a better audience experience so those kinds of situations can be can be good uh I think the the main thing though you want to be aware of is is that audience experience you know I've been I've seen talks for example where they basically alternate and went back and forth a fairly quick succession and that was pretty uncomfortable because you're just sort of getting into the flow of one thing and then it switches over here and sometimes if it's done really well sometimes that can work there's certain ways I think of delivery that that people who have worked together and done this a ton can build off of each other and it can be super super good but that's not most of us most of us are probably not going to

deliver at that level so I would want to be very careful about the structure and content when you're transitioning to the other person and making sure those Segways are really really smooth uh and that it's Justified that you have additional speakers sometimes I think what a lot of people end up doing is they submit I think there's a few different scenarios one is they submit multiple speakers because maybe they're nervous and they'd feel better having another person up there which I totally get can respect that a lot of compassion for that but sometimes that's not the best for the talk and so really thinking about can you can you construct a talk effectively with two people in a way that is going to keep people engaged and be clear to follow uh so on and so forth so I think keeping all of that in mind and if you can't then even if that someone that you you just you really want to do this talk but you feel so much better if they were there I'd probably wait until you had a better topic that you could split between two

people or uh consider just working toward a goal of being able to get up on stage by by yourself the other reason I see it sometimes is because there's uh well the the sometimes it's just uncertainty we don't know we have to go through and be like yeah we're not gonna have five speakers on this so who did you really mean and things like that so sometimes it's just that sort of logistical piece which not a big fan of try to get those details clarified up front because it puts a lot of work on us and it's just rarely clear what you're actually intending uh and then the other reason is sometimes strong ownership so people are like no no this is my section I'm going to speak to this section and again that can be okay provided that they can be whomever you're partnering with Can Be an Effective speaker and is going to be comfortable up up on stage but generally I think it is harder it's twice the work you've got to in a lot of ways right

because you've got to really coordinate with the other person and make sure that you're on the same wavelength and you've got all of your timing teed up and you've got to practice that a lot more you know if I'm doing a talk with someone which I've done a few over the years I'll practice that one a lot more say than another one that I'm delivering just because I I know me I know how I work I know and you know after all these years I'm pretty good at my timing and everything but it just it's all harder when you're doing that with another another person awesome yeah that all makes sense cool well we have three minutes left I want to make sure to keep it open if anyone has any any other questions um if you have any questions about the submission process or tips about putting together really stand out um and Stellar presentation itself please feel free to ask okay well I guess I have one more

question um it's do you have any top or any advice around um topics uh that are best suited for uh like lectures versus panels versus roundtables um or something around like any tips around like how to structure that proposal if it's different from from what you've said before yeah I think panels are an interesting one uh it's it's a lot easier to do a bad panel than I think most people realize I think as audience members we all can think back to panels we were like yeah that wasn't that wasn't so good um so what does it mean to have a good panel I think it really is it should be content that is fairly Dynamic and where you've put in a lot of prep for the panel I think a lot of times the reason we end up with a bunch of panel submissions is because there's

speaking of misconceptions there's a misconception that they're just much less work because it's just gonna be a conversation so just here's a couple ideas here's some people and we'll have a conversation it'll be great uh it's usually not great actually doesn't work out very well so put the effort in to figuring out the topics figuring out the strengths of each of your speakers what they really want to speak to you know I've seen talks or panels part of me go way off the rails because someone had an agenda that's the thing they really wanted to talk to it doesn't matter what questions you asked they just steered it right to that so go do the work to figure out what those those topics are and then give people space to be able to to share their thoughts and and build a dynamic kind of conversation you also need to have a strong moderator you can keep people on topic who can float the conversation if it dries up so thinking carefully about about that so if you can provide all of those things and you think this is a good conversational topic a panel can be great otherwise I would default to a lecture and sharing topics that way or a round table something where you think you could

really engage a broader selection of the audience as well and it's a little bit more free form and there's a big topic there that's worth exploring then again with a very strong moderator uh that can be that can be very effective awesome well thank you so much Kim uh this was all filled with a lot of really great information I know I learned a lot and I really appreciate you coming out and answering everyone's questions and my questions um yeah thank you so much that was great thanks everyone good luck hope to see your submissions thank you yes so hope to see you I'll see you on your submission see you at gdc24 [Music] thank you