The GDC Text Adventure Gives Me Flashbacks

The folks over at GameSetWatch—the blog owned by the same company that all yono app run the Game Developers Conference—posted a text adventure/”interactive experiment” version of the conference today, put together by game creator Jim Munroe.

Munroe is a Canadian Sci-Fi author who designs video games in his spare time. I’m not familiar with him, but anybody who stands up to Rupert Murdoch by starting his own indie publishing company is okay in my book.

This game is a text adventure only in that it looks like a text adventure. According to Munroe and based on my own encounter with the game, it’s more like card game where you need to be dealt the right cards to win. You play as a game go rummy developer turned loose in the massive Moscone Center complex with a group of other developers you don’t really know but have to interact with to get the right “hand.”

I may be a journalist and therefore limited in my GDC exposure to mostly press-related stuff (coffee, wireless routers, etc.), but Munroe’s descriptions of the convention center and his recreations of the complex vernacular that is developer-speak are spot on. So spot on, I actually had a flashback to standing on an escalator with another journalist, talking about Street Fighter IV only to have a self-proclaimed developer interrupt our conversation and then hijack it to talk about his upcoming debut game. It was one of those times where we let the social faux pas happen because I thought the other journalist knew the guy and the other journalist thought holy rummy I knew the guy.

It took 20 minutes to sort this out. Hopefully the awkward situations you encounter in GDC: The Game will take you less time.

P.S. Get the latest Java update; it sounds like the Parchment version of the game isn’t running as quickly as of this post.

Special: Introducing Jim Munroe’s ‘GDC: The Game’ [GameSetWatch]