I just got this success story from Jeff Edward Ball explaining to me some of the stuff he experienced at GDC after reading my networking guide. I think Jeff really took the right lessons from my articles. I particularly love his “don’t talk about video games unless someone brings them up” rule and the phrase “sweaty guy,” with which I was previously unfamiliar and will absolutely use in the future. From Jeff:

A short background on me is that I’m a pretty quiet, easily forgettable, analytical type who has a hard time initiating conversation, and I’m horrible at remembering names. I’m awesome at one-on-one conversation, but I suck at groups.

My first GDC was actually 2006 and I was still in college. That GDC was pretty much a total failure. I wasn’t prepared, and didn’t make any connections at all. I only had an expo pass, so I basically ran around the expo floor filling my bag with all the t-shirts I could find. I got a total of 19 that year, including 3 man-purses, and other various things, so at least I came out with my money’s worth. I remember being kinda shocked about the expo floor booth people, after finding the guts to talk to them, that they were actually stand-offish and bitter at my questions about hiring composers. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

My friend Will, who’s a composer at Lucasarts now, eventually recommended your blog. A lot of what you wrote was good general preparation for things, like social etiquette, how to think of people, how to REMEMBER people, how to present yourself, stuff like that. All of that was excellent and I learned a ton.

What affected me the most about the blog was a sort of pervasive attitude that I got from it as a whole, and I decided to make it an experiment. When I went to GDC that year, I prepared myself properly with good clothes, business cards, demo CDs, Resumes, and a rule that I made for myself: “don’t talk about anything video game related, unless someone asks me.” I went in and came out with 50 business cards by the end of the week, and most of these people are still pretty strong connections. I appealed to the composers I met with my violin skills, and that lead to working with some relatively big-name composers providing them live session stuff. That really helped me stand out, as well as telling stories of commercial fishing in Alaska, since I do that too. The rule I set up also helped me avoid something that I’ve heard called being a “sweaty guy.” Sweaty guys are the guys who are at GDC trying to get work, but they’re super star-struck and intimidated. So they walk up to talk to people who are chatting in groups, but they just stand there and get nervous and sweaty instead.

It’s so hard to point out any one situation where I took your advice, because it was kinda like everything I did was somehow influenced by the blog. I remember being at a party and randomly joining a conversation just because everyone in the group was named Jeff. By the end of it, I had made an impression at the very least, and I had all of their business cards. I remember DRAGGING myself out of bed to get breakfast at 7:30am, because there was a group of guys meeting for breakfast burritos. I remember showing a French CEO to Office Depot because he needed to make copies. Showed my friends how to get to a party using Google maps since nobody knew where to go. I made friends with people, and didn’t view anyone like a business connection. I didn’t change my persona to appeal to people I probably wouldn’t like in the first place. It didn’t matter who they were, I gave people the respect I would give myself, and I feel like I’m starting to become more integrated and part of the industry because of it.

And hey, if you need a composer, arranger, or violinist, you should check out Jeff’s professional work as well as his demo reel of original compositions. I like the arranging he did for Monkey Island 2: Special Edition.

Casey Monroe wrote up a nice overview of GDC, themed around the difference between T-shirt and sport coat types. In particular, he talks about a dinner we had which was kind of a sequel to last year’s dinner that I recorded on video. I met Casey’s brother Will at last year’s dinner, and this year Will brought along Casey too. In Casey’s words:

One night, something strange happens.  My brother and I are attending a dinner at a nearby wine bar, with some (old and new) friends in the game industry.  We sit and talk with Adam, an old bandmate who now does iPhone/iPad development.  I finally meet Daniel Cook of Lost Garden, and Darius Kazemi of Tiny Subversions, as well as five or six other designers, developers and game industry professionals sitting around the table, and the conversation is…different.  We’re not networking—we’re just talking.  We’re talking about our ideas, our love of the art form, our belief in the potential of the future of gaming, the insight that games offer into the human condition.  We’re just sitting and talking about games—and it feels good.  After days and days of making contacts, suddenly I am making friends.  It feels relaxed.  It feels natural.  It feels, in fact, just like changing out of my sport coat and back into a t-shirt.

I think he does a good job of capturing the feeling of what I love about GDC. I think that dinner lasted about three hours and I missed a bunch of parties as a result, but it was worth it.

I would take exception to one thing he says: making friends is networking. In fact, it’s the most effective kind.

Speaking of T-shirts — Matthew Wasteland and I have a few new shirts available at the store. I’ll post about them soon, but you can check them out here.

I got some great comments on my last post about business cards, and I’m going to highlight them here in case you missed them. But first I’m going to subject you to a little rant that I’ve given at conferences.

Corporate vs. Personal Cards

There are two kinds of business cards. There’s the card that represents you as the employee of a company, and there’s the card that represents you as a person. The key difference is that the company card puts the identity of the company over your own identity. Here’s an example of a corporate business card:

Notice how much space the logo takes up, and how small the font is for the person's name.

The logo and the address of the company take up most of the non-white space on the card.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is a fine corporate business card. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But it sets a bad example for personal business cards. I often see students (and even professionals!) emulate the design of corporate cards on their personal cards, sometimes going so far as to design a logo and make that the biggest thing on their card.

Your personal card should reflect who you are. I don’t mean that in the warm and fuzzy sense: it literally needs to tell me who you are so I can remember you. This means your name should be the biggest thing on the card by far.

Here’s an example of a great personal business card.

It's memorable because it's funny.

The card above is from an excellent article about business cards for musicians (although the advice applies to anyone). There’s nothing fancy about it in terms of card stock or font or color. It’s completely unremarkable except that it’s well-designed and memorable. The guy’s name is the biggest single information band on the card, and right under that it tells me what he does. There’s contact information below, and then in the corners there are some tongue-in-cheek descriptors of the guy’s services. (This is a great technique for someone to use — provided you remember that this card has a context. Specifically this is a card that will be given to other musicians. “Bad attitude” and “always late” are things that will make a fellow musician laugh. If this same musician were trying to get booked to play weddings, the joke would completely backfire.)

Anyway, remember: you are not an anonymous drone. Your business card needs to reflect that.

Comment Roundup

I got some great comments on my business card post.

While I recommended Scribus for those designing their own business cards, Noah Kantrowitz pointed out Businesscardland, a website where you can design a card from templates for free. It’ll even render a PDF that you can take to a print shop.

Jeromie Walters asked whether he should put a head shot of himself on his card. Brenda Brathwaite once told me that she tried putting her head shot on her card, and the only thing it did was make her feel like a real estate agent! Bottom line: don’t put a photo of yourself on your card. Consider a cartoon or an abstraction of your face. It’s what I do.

Ian Schreiber talked about the backpack he always brings to GDC.

As for running out during the day, personally I always carry my backpack with me. In it I have:
* All of my cards, so I can “restock” in a few seconds rather than having to head back to the hotel;
* Notebooks and pens, both to take notes myself and to offer to the people sitting next to me if they need it;
* Laptop computer and power cord, also for taking notes and in case anyone needs one to show a software demo or something;
* Emergency snacks and drinks, so that I’m never in a session where I’m distracted from a brilliant speaker by something mundane like bodily hunger signals (and likewise, headache medicine in case my skull picks a bad time to vasodilate);
* Board games, because I want people to think of me when they’re trying to find the fun 
* Any swag or random stuff I pick up along the way.

My shoulders are usually sore by the end of the week from walking around like a pack mule, but the convenience of having everything I need in reach at a moment’s notice is too great to give up.

Alex Forsythe asked how a student should communicate their area of expertise on their business card, since a student can’t really claim to be a level designer if they haven’t really designed many levels. I responded that “Aspring Level Designer” or “Student of Level Design” would be fine. Ian Schreiber gave the following response:

I’ve seen some pretty clever student business cards. Darius wrote his tagline “a generally useful guy to know” which, aside from being accurate, was more memorable than “aspiring game programmer/designer” or whatever.

I saw one student card, I still have it somewhere, that introduced the person as “the mythical female programmer”… again, more memorable than “aspiring.”

I suppose you need to be careful with this, though. It’s easy to cross the line from “memorable” to “cliche” or “cheesy”. So maybe that kind of thing is best for your second year at GDC, after you’ve already seen what other cards are out there.

As always, thanks to everyone who commented for their good questions and helpful answers.

Update, June 2010: Erin Hoffman has additional advice:

Ian’s point is a great one. It’s the one thing I would add to Darius’s advice… I suspect for first-timers the words on the card are actually more important than the card’s visual design, though it’s certainly possible to excessively advertise non-pro status by having a business card that looks out-of-date, is too busy, or has poorly printed graphics. The worst one I saw from a student was glossy and black with a grainy graphic of something on it — I’m not even sure what. A classy but plain non-glossy white card with Times New Roman on it is much safer.

When I was a student I had “Creativity for Hire” on my card, which got comments from most of the people I handed it to. I didn’t really even expect that reaction — I just had an assortment of things I wanted to do and needed a broad phrase that would capture them. And I didn’t have that card very long. :) If I had to do it over again I would stick to the same — keep it simple, put your web address on the card, and aim your thought energy at a memorable (unique) phrase that encapsulates what you have to offer

Someone recently asked me, “How many business cards should I take to the Game Developers Conference?”

The short answer: 300, but you should bring up to 500 if you can afford it.

Longer answer: the one time I ran of out business cards at GDC was my first year. I brought 200 and ran out by my fifth day. You should assume that you’ll probably give out 50 cards a day at GDC, especially if it’s your first year attending. (When you come back a second year you don’t have to give a card to people you already know, so your first year will probably be the most demanding in terms of card usage.) I think 50 a day is about average, but it’s very possible to give out 100 cards in a day.

So if you’re going to be there for five days, bring at least 300. If you’re going to be there for three days, bring at least 200. Honestly though, you might as well bring 500 cards. If you have a few hundred left over, hey, use them at the next networking event you attend!

Tips for Printing and Designing Cards

Vistaprint is probably the best-regarded online business card service (they serve both the US and EU). I tend to use Staples to print my cards by going to the store and placing an order in person — of the national brick-and-mortar chains that print business cards, I think their quality-to-price ratio is the best. As I’ve said before, you should print your card on non-glossy stock, as it’s hard to take notes on a glossy card.

You can design your business card in any software you’re comfortable with as long as you can create a PDF file in the correct dimensions. If you’d like to design your own business cards and don’t know where to begin, I recommend Scribus. The dimensions for an American business card are 2″ tall by 3.5″ wide, and you want to leave at least 0.25″ margins for printer variation. For some nice fonts you might want to use, check out this article and this website.

Update: there’s a followup post I’ve written.

Gamasutra recently published a good interview with Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky. But wait! This is not another blog post where I’m talking about how Spelunky is the best game ever. I wanted to draw your attention instead to the comment thread for the post. (Update Aug 19, 2011: looks like Adam Coate’s profile has been removed from Gamasutra, which nukes all his comments. 1) here is an archive of the original thread so you can read the whole thing. 2) Gamasutra, you should change your policy so that comments are preserved on threads when accounts are removed/deleted. 3) I have replaced every link in this article with a link to the archive, so individual comment references should hold.)

There was a fair amount of discussion about the thread on Twitter recently. It is a prime example of how to be an ungracious person and a how to badmouth people and be that guy. He’s an indie developer with serious entitlement issues. You should definitely read the whole thread, as it is equal parts entertaining and irritating, but I’ve included the gist of it here with some commentary of my own.

This guy Adam Coate posted the following comment:

[Being a suffering artist is the s]tory of my life right there. And once the game’s done, even more suffering comes from the lack of exposure certain gaming-related websites are willing to give us unknowns, yet are perfectly willing to run full-blown features on Boulder Dash clones, just because they’ve already been featured on TIGSource. Feel free to take a bit of a risk by giving some press to a game that actually deserves it, Gamasutra (oh, I don’t know, Flytrap, maybe?).

So he criticized the proprietors of the website he’s posting on (which is okay if a little dickish) and insulted the developer being interviewed in the article he’s commenting on (totally not okay). Kris Graft, who works for Gamasutra, responded by asking:

Maybe people would consider talking to you about your game if you had a better attitude? Or emailed editors of certain gaming-related websites for consideration, maybe? Don’t make yourself suffer more than you have to.

Adam went on to complain that he tried emailing the editors and didn’t get a response. Fair enough. There some more back-and-forth, mostly people trying to tell him that Spelunky actually isn’t a piece of crap, and then Michael Rose of Indiegames.com chimes in:

[J]ust thought I should throw a few words in here. I’m one of the editors at Indiegames.com, and I received your email about Flytrap about a month ago. The email contained a few paragraphs about the game, and 3 screenshots.

After reading what you sent me, I then went to check out the game more. Your email didn’t supply a website, so I went hunting for one, and came up with nothing. You hadn’t even supplied a link to the Xbox Live Marketplace page for your game, which was a little odd given this is what you were trying to sell to me. After Googling it and finding the page, I was presented with a ‘Content not found’ page on the Xbox.com site. Not a great start.

I then decided to hunt on Youtube for a video of your game, and yet again came up with nothing. Honestly, you are here complaining that no-one is giving coverage to your game, and yet the real problem is that you need to have a quick and very easy lesson in marketing. How is anyone meant to get excited about your game when all you give them is 3 measly screenshots which all look the same?

Unfortunately your view of gaming sites which cover indie titles has been skewed due to your feeling of rejection. This is completely understandable, but coming on here and spouting off about how your game hasn’t received the ‘deserved recognition’ it needs is pretty childish. Maybe you should instead be trying to work out WHY your game hasn’t taken off how you would have liked. As I said before, marketing your game properly would be a very good start.

Seems like case closed, right? Wrong. Adam posts a gracious thank-you to Michael, and Michael points out Rodain Joubert’s excellent indie game marketing guide.

“Miyamoto never had to work for press like this.”

Meanwhile, he’s been having a side argument with Brandon Sheffield, editor of Game Developer Magazine and writer for Gamasutra. Basically, Brandon chastised Adam for his poor attitude. Adam’s response was “Well, it got your attention didn’t it?” Brandon responded saying that yes, it got his attention but now he has a negative view of Adam and his game. Adam’s response is simultaneously heartbreaking and legendarily self-delusional:

I apologize for my negative first impression, but after having spent a year of my life struggling to survive while I create a game that even my girlfriend didn’t believe in (which changed once she saw how blind playtesters reacted to it), it’s a little disheartening to just be completely ignored by the world. Miyamoto never had to work for press like this.

Really? He didn’t? As later commenters point out, Miyamoto worked on many many titles before he received any kind of personal recognition from the wider gaming audience. Furthermore, Miyamoto worked and has always worked for a large game company with an entire marketing division. So while he personally didn’t do much marketing for Super Mario Bros., he had probably dozens of people doing it instead.

Later on in the thread, Adam takes back his remarks about Spelunky and admits that the Miyamoto comment was hilariously uninformed.

Best of all, as a result of the thread, Michael Rose was prompted to write up The Idiot’s Guide to Marketing Your Indie Game. It’s full of very specific advice on how to contact game journalists about your game and what sort of email you should be writing them. It reminds me a lot of writing a resume for a game development job: you need to stand out but also tailor it to your specific audience.

There’s a whole bunch more to the comments section. At one point Adam decides to break out some armchair evolutionary psychology, explaining that women love to shop and eat and consume while men like to destroy and it’s just a fact people come on don’t you get it. But that’s really more of a hilarious digression.

And finally, the title of this blog post comes from one of Brandon Boyer‘s two beautifully acerbic comments (1) (2) on the thread.

Rands (AKA Michael Lopp) has a new essay about networking. In particular, it’s about the kind of “soft” networking that I’m always talking about. It’s the kind of networking that isn’t directed, where your goal is just to meet interesting people. Rands takes that idea of meeting interesting people and applies a bit more focus, where it’s about meeting “Your People.”

I have a lot of My People in my life. I just got back from GDC Austin and it was one of the best conference experiences I’ve ever had. I think now that it’s because the evenings were full of My People. Rands is right: My People will question what I’m doing with my life and push me in often unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable directions. But that’s part of the fun.

The part that really resonated with me is the bit about stories. Rands says that all day long, there’s a story being written in our own heads.

It’s your inner dialogue and it’s often full of shit. [...] We see the world how we want. A carpenter sees all problems as a nail. I see problems as finite state machines.

As we edit our days into these stories, there is always a risk of fiction. [...]

You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth.

Networking is the art of finding those who are willing to listen to and critique your stories.

Dave Edery has a short but substantive post on his blog with some networking tips. I agree with all of them. Here’s the high-level, though you should visit his blog to see the detailed descriptions:

This man, Joel Bauer, is apparently a real person giving real advice to real people (warning, link may cause your brain to explode).

Uh, don’t take his advice. Please. He’s the kind of person who gives networking a bad name.

Yeah, I have a few networking gimmicks. But your foil-embossed, die-cut, pop-up card? Screw that. (Unless it says something about you. At GDC I met a girl who’s a metalsmith and she gave me a metal card that she made herself. THAT IS COOL.)

He does have one good point buried in the bullshit: it’s important to let people know, via your business card, what you actually do, as opposed to your often-meaningless title.

But the gimmicks, and the arrogance, and the sense of superiority? People can smell that coming a mile away.

In the video he says that networking is not about being likable, it’s about getting results. Ask yourself: would you want to be friends with this guy? Would you want to do business with this guy?

Looks like I have a networking challenge this year at GDC. I lost my voice completely. No idea what caused it. Seems like some sinus stuff compounded with yelling at parties. Yes, I am drinking tea, taking meds, etc.

I’d like to point out this great post by Nels Anderson on how to survive a layoff in the game industry. Note that this more or less boils down to Steve Gaynor’s advice of, “Make cool shit, show it off.”