Dispatches from GDC 2018: Day Five

I woke up at 8 AM, ate breakfast, then returned to sleep for a few more hours. Today is the last day of GDC, but it seems in many ways as though I have always been here. How is this the 5th day of GDC but also the 10th and the 32nd and the 145th? Whatever meaning time has, it does not exist here. I am glad to be returning home.

I had no real meetings today, no structures, only people to disappoint by failing to meet them. Over the past week I have have endeavored to try and meet the folks I used to write with back at Kill Screen and I found them, to a person, delightful. Though Kill Screen now exists only in the reckonings of the people who used to write for it, scattered throughout internet journalism, academia and the wider world, those people are still around. To see so many of them in one place, people I had not known before, was heartening. There was never a question of whether they deserved the ill treatment they received at the hands of our shared past boss (they did not) but it’s nice finding out that they are lovely, funny and endearing. To meet them was not a disappointment, and I hope they felt the same way.

In light of this freer schedule, I dressed the part of young trash writer that I often occupy when I’m not trying to impress other, more well off people. It’s a wonder what your wardrobe can look like when you are not trying to be taken seriously. Clothing is a costume, and I have always found the tiresome habit of dressing as an adult to be my worst costume. So instead I dressed like how a six year old wishes an adult dresses like. That look I nailed.

I rode the carousel in the park with a young mother and her child because I had five minutes and my outfit was good. I said goodbye to the people I had met over the week. Conclusions were made. Requests to see each other next year were appropriately given.

I am writing this final dispatch for you, dear reader, in the blue light of a United red eye towards Chicago on what is perhaps technically the 6th day. Time has little meaning here, next to a softly snoring man and with my phone turned dutifully  off, so it seems a fitting place to end our journey. As I fly into the inky blackness of consumer air travel, my seat overflowing with the girth of my fellow sleeping passenger, the hours turning forward as though I am in the worlds worst time machine, I wish there was something profound to say. There isn’t. It’s just air travel, and at the end of the week I suppose, it’s just GDC.