What were the main themes of the Game Developers Conference last week?
I participated in the Real-time Research session where my group (Ulrika Bennerstedt, Mia Consalvo, Jonas Linderoth, Meagan Rothschild, John Sharp + me) examined what participants were twittering about in the #gdc channel. I made a script to collect the twitter data, then we analyzed word frequencies using Wordle.
[Update: Download the pdf here.]
Brief analysis:
- During the summits on Monday and Tuesday, the iPhone was the most commonly discussed platform.
- Wednesday and Thursday were dominated by the Satoru Iwata and Hideo Kojima keynotes.
- Friday was dominated by the all-star panel on the Role of Games in Personal and Social Change.
- Apart from that, it was a somewhat theme-less conference, with casual, indie and social games taking up still larger parts of the conversation, and some element of a wait-and-see attitude. Are video games recession-proof?
Monday:
Tuesday:
Wednesday:
Thursday:
Friday:
Haha, I spent my downtime at GDC reading the twitter feeds.
Jesper, thanks for posting these, they are such the thing that you can get lost looking at the smaller hits to. And I’m still trying to see if they have the ‘Magic Eye’ 3D image buried in them somewhere… just need to look harder!
This is great. I’m sure there would have been a LOT more tweets during the conference if we could have gotten a signal from within Moscone! I know I tried…
When you make these, is there any way to filter out words like “game”?
Yes, you can filter individual words in Wordle – you could make arguments pro and con removing some of the words.