This was only my second year covering the Game Developers Conference, but I believe it’s the most important regular gathering of the video-game industry. The GDC, held this year in February in San Francisco, isn’t a trade show—that’s what E3 is for—and any attempts by corporations to turn it into a forum for promoting products should be resisted.

That’s because the GDC isn’t about selling video games, it’s about making video games. This year, it featured lectures by programmers about the software solution they implemented in creating Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a presentation on motion-capture techniques used in creating Beowulf, and a review of music in Killer7, God Hand, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, and No More Heroes. There were roundtable discussions on topics ranging from artificial intelligence to preserving games for history. Seminars sponsored by companies like AMD, Intel, Havok, and Autodesk functioned as tutorials for game developers.

What amazes me is the careful thought that goes into making video games, no matter how blood-spattered they may be. For example, I’ll bet you didn’t know that the upcoming Far Cry 2 was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. If video-game detractors took the time to attend the GDC, they might not be so knee-jerk in their treatment of the medium.

Why is the GDC important?

It’s the place where Eric Holmes can admit that Prototype, the new open-world game he’s creating, is for players who, rather than save the school bus teetering on the edge of a bridge, would rather push it off.

It’s the place where Clint Hocking can talk about reconciling sensual and rational immersion to make video games “be to film what film today is to radio”, and the following day quote a programmer—“Dude, it’s just code. We can do anything”—as a way of demonstrating that video-game developers are limited not by their creativity, but by their courage to create games that have meaning. “The mechanics of trust are not harder to code than the mechanics of rope,” Hocking said.

It’s the place where Ken Levine, the writer and designer behind BioShock, can admit that he “pissed off some people on this project”, because his story writing, he explained, was submitted late in the development process. Levine justified this, though, by insisting that a writer needs to be open to the game telling him what the story is, and that just as spawn points can be moved late in a game’s development, story elements should also be malleable until the end of the process.

It’s the place where Jane McGonigal, who worked on World Without Oil, can implore designers to make the real world as good as virtual worlds. Psychologists, she said, have determined that happiness is based on four things: having satisfying work to do, being good at something, spending time with people we like, and being part of something bigger than ourselves. Working on games helps you achieve these things better than anything else, McGonigal said. “Games are the ultimate happiness engine.”

It’s the place where Sims creator Will Wright can hold forth for 40 minutes on worlds—his word for entertainment franchises like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings—without even mentioning his new game, Spore. With a break in his presentation for the “Russian Space Minute”, in which he told the true story of a failed Soviet rocket launch, Wright concluded that the best stories can be deconstructed, leading to play, which, when generative, results in myriad stories being told.

It’s the place where Peter Molyneux, in talking about his new game Fable 2, can suggest that when people play video games they should feel good, and offer that only five percent of the players of the first Fable—in which players suffered consequences for their actions—“had the stomach to be evil”. “I’m going to try and make it tough for you to be good,” he said about Fable 2.

It’s the place where Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw—the team lead and writer, respectively, for Portal, named Game of the Year at the GDC Awards—can explain that having to cope with constraints, such as limited time and resources, was a big reason their game came out the way it did. “Embrace your constraints as fuel for creativity,” Wolpaw offered.

It’s the place where indie developer Jonathan Mak’s eight-minute session can consist of getting 750 game developers to stand up and bat balloons around the room accompanied by a pop-guitar soundtrack.

That’s why the GDC matters. It’s a place where smart people get together to talk about a subject they share an interest in. The fact that the subject is video games is—almost—irrelevant.