Before last week, I never thought ideas had mass. I always assumed that the accumulation of thought was the slow reconfiguring of the cells in your brain, a sort of physical steady state enriched by laying down increasingly complex patterns on the same wetware.

After a week at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, I have to assume that knowledge has weight. My head was packed tighter than a Tokyo subway at rush-hour. And just when you can’t image one more idea sneaking in, here it would come, rushing the crowd with elbows up. Your chin sinks to chest as the load between your ears accumulates.

This was my second GDC and I think I finally understand why a relatively little is written about the event when compared to E3. For anyone at GDC for any period of time, the cognitive overload is brutal. I suppose I’ll be subconsciously sorting out all the good ideas in my sleep for months. The effect of GDC will dribble out over weeks and months. But it’s awfully hard to get it down into a sensible written form while its’ going on or even immediately after.

I also think the very intellectual and conceptual nature of the conference is a natural reflection of the medium itself. We can argue and discuss how to get more emotion into games. But etched into the DNA of games are rules—ideas not feelings.

Ernest Adams delivered a fascinating speech at what he honestly described as at the “ass end of the conference” on the philosophical roots of game design. The good news is, despite the time slot, he packed the room with what must have been at least 500 people. This seems to indicate an intellectual appetite in the game development world. The bad news is, he put his finger on a central problem of game design and didn’t seem to have much to say about its solution. I’m assuming that it was a time issue, but it might be something more fundamental.

The thesis of his speech is that the games business is a classic, rational pursuit that David Hume would find perfectly sensible. And although we aspire to the romantic heights of Lord Byron in the outputs of our labors, wanna-be William Blakes will have a hard time finding much to like in the industry today. Adams saw in game development a technological fascination more in common with the Victorian steam engine than with the epic verse of a Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Or, as he summed up, "The game industry tries to achieve romantic ends by classical means. That's why it's so hard."

For me, this classical, rational focus of the medium makes it goddamn difficult to try and impart any sort of feeling of what it is like to be at GDC. When asked, I stutter out something like, “Great. Wonderful. Exhausting. Brilliant.” Unless someone wants to hear about the really cool ideas Chris Crawford has about measuring information, Aki Järvinen’s structural analysis on why sports are games or Michael Mateas extolling the virtues of Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manefesto”, it’s hard to get the feel of the conference. And these are just examples of conversations I had in the halls and bars of the extended GDC ecosystem.

To write about rock and roll is to write about sweat and sex and broken bottles. You don’t have to love rock to understand its passion. You kind of do have to know why Mario 64 was so awwwesome! to get why video games matter. Or put it this way, a love of video games takes some thought. GDC is the same way. To describe it is to describe a bunch of people standing or sitting around chit chatting. To be there is take a step closer to the meaning of everything.

So, what I’m left with is that GDC is like four years of college distilled and shook up over a week. It’s friendly and frenetic, overwhelming and intellectually satisfying. On the other hand, if you didn’t love video games, I can imagine you’d think of it as the longest, dullest cocktail party of your life.

Note: I updated Ernest's quote 4.3.4 per his correction. If anyone is counting.