On June 18th 2012, so a bit over two years ago, I announced Gameconfs on Twitter.

I have never talked about Gameconfs on this blog (or elsewhere), so why not do so now?

Back in 2009-2010, as I was starting to do more business development at Mipumi, it bothered me more and more that there was no good list of game events to be found anywhere. Some industry press websites have one, but they were (and are) not very comprehensive. (I've written to one of those websites, repeatedly, about cooperating, and they never got back to me.)

Looking at my Pinboard history, I first started collecting information about a possible game event calendar back in 2010. Back then I tentatively called it "gdcal". I decided to actually build my own calendar in May 2012.

My goals for Gameconfs

I had (and still have) a couple of goals for the site.

First of all, I wanted to provide a free and useful service to people in the game industry, solving my own problem in the process.

Second, I wanted to use this project as an excuse to do some more web development. In 2012, I was creative director of Mipumi, and while I did more programming than the average creative director, I wanted to have a small project that I controlled and where I could apply a lot of the things I had learned about web development in my spare time.

As a consequence, Gameconfs could have been built simpler and faster. For instance, I could have just put up a public Google doc, or a page on this blog, or added every game event I came across to Lanyrd.

Gameconfs didn't really need a database and perhaps it still doesn't. But I wanted to use Python and learn how to use a real database, and so Gameconfs became a Python app getting event data from PostgreSQL. Right now, a dump of the entire database is about 87 kilobytes, so PostgreSQL is overkill. But I did learn a lot about web development, and that has been generally useful for me.

Third, I wanted to provide a high quality, consistent service with as small a time commitment as possible.

I've been paying attention to the web startup etc. scene for a while. I knew that while I wanted Gameconfs to exist, I wouldn't be passionate enough about it to make it a full-time project. I also couldn't see a reasonable way to make money from Gameconfs. So I was very careful to not put myself into a position where I'd have to choose between abandoning the project or doing work I didn't want to do.

This has had a big influence on the design. I want to do things as well as I can, as consistently as I can, or not at all. This is why I don't cover every possible event I could (more about that later). And it is why the data I collect per event is quite limited. People have asked me about adding submission dates or conference schedules, but that'd be a lot of work to do per event.

And before you ask: yes, I could use crowdsourcing. But crowdsourcing isn't free.

For one, it requires technical infrastructure. For the first year of Gameconfs, I couldn't even add or edit events directly on the site. Instead, I added the event data to a big text file, generated the database from that, dumped the database, uploaded it, and imported it into the live database. A bit cumbersome, but it worked.

Eventually, I added user management, creating / editing / deleting forms, data validation, database backups, etc. This is not the hardest thing to program, but it's not something you roll out after an hour's worth of coding either.

Extending this to support proper crowdsourcing would take a lot more work. I'd want to have multiple user roles, auditing so it's clear who changed what. I'd need views to make it possible to review recent changes and edit user roles.

Beyond the technical side, it requires some form of community management. And also some kind of forum somewhere where discussions within the community can take place. And community management takes time.

Gameconfs' dirty little secret is that I can ignore it for a few weeks or so before it becomes obvious that I've not been adding events. And while that's not something I do on a regular basis, it's nice to know that I can do that, in case, you know, I decide to move to another country, like I did last year.

What I learned making Gameconfs

The biggest thing I learned building Gameconfs, and what most people learn when they see it, is that there are a ton of game-related events out there.

It's been really interesting to see what's happening in countries I didn't know much about, or sub-sections of games I wasn't aware of. It has also given me trivia about game events to break the ice at parties, like that conference that took place on Christmas.

I also found that there are entire classes of events that I better not add to Gameconfs. Competitions, game jams, game-related concerts, tournaments, board- and pen-and-paper-related events: they're all not on Gameconfs, because there are other people who do a much better job tracking them than I ever could, and whose sites are better suited for it.

Andreas Zecher is more on top of independent game submission dates than I will ever be. The person behind Compohub tracks more game jams, and has a site that is better designed for it, than Gameconfs. So I link to them here.

The future

What's in the future? I've been talking to people about sponsoring the site, in a tasteful way, and that might happen at some point. Because while I've invested a lot of time, I've not invested any money so far. So getting a proper logo, or letting a real web designer go over the site, have been out of the question so far.

What I do next in terms of development depends on what people ask for. Because that's another thing I learned: the stuff I thought I'd need turned out to not be necessary.

So if you have ideas for features you'd like to see: let me know. Or, if you just like the site, let me know too, or share it with your friends and co-workers.

Here's to many more years of Gameconfs!