i've seen too many tech talks/presos that suffer from a few totally fixable issues, and decided to write about it: gpfault.net/posts/gripes... - ThreadSky

nicebyte.bsky.social • 78 days ago

i've seen too many tech talks/presos that suffer from a few totally fixable issues, and decided to write about it:
https://gpfault.net/posts/gripes-with-presos.txt.html

Comments

bartwr.bsky.social•77 days ago

Agree with your every point, especially slides.

My pet peeve: lack of narrative. "We did x/y/z" and going into details.
C'mon, I am at a conference watching 10+ talks a day, I will not remember those details, and mostly don't care.
Give me something to remember, a "story".

karltechno.bsky.social•77 days ago

This is definitely what makes for the best and most memorable talks for me. Especially if a talk is structured so that you feel like you're going on a journey with the speaker.

bartwr.bsky.social•77 days ago

What was the "villain" (problem) of your story? What was the brilliant insight that I could apply elsewhere? What remains to be done?

A lot of GDC-style game tech talks are terrible, sorry. Repeating the same stuff (with tiny tricks) over and over. Those should have been blog posts/tweets.

humus512.bsky.social•77 days ago

If there's an actual story to it, I agree. That can make the insights memorably and make you go back for the details. But this should be used in moderation too. As a counter-example, I can't stand most TED Talks for their artificial storification added for "inspiration". It gets dull pretty fast.

bartwr.bsky.social•77 days ago

I don't mean telling personal stories, I hate those, very narcissistic. I mean describing your contributions like a story - why was it important, what were the insights, what did you learn and what it allowed for? If there were none, don't waste people's time with talking about it.

alexene.dev•77 days ago

Have to agree, especially as the thing presented rarely is the first idea implemented, so describing the journey to get to that final solution and what you learned on the way there is always interesting to me.

daddygame.dev•77 days ago

I attended a talk about giving better talks, and he had a similar point about not making the audience read and listen at the same time.

His solution was slides with one or two sentences on, then when he showed a new slide he'd just pause and be quiet for 30 seconds to allow everyone to read it.

daddygame.dev•77 days ago

It was refreshing as it took a lot of the unconcious stress of trying to read and listen at the same time, and made the pacing of the whole talk a lot calmer.

daddygame.dev•77 days ago

I try to do it myself, but it's a really hard trick to pull off. You've got to be really sure your words stand on their own, and confident enough to just stand in silence without worrying about your audience switching off or thinking you've forgotten what you're saying next.

ivopavlik.bsky.social•78 days ago

📌

mjp123.bsky.social•78 days ago

Personally I like slides with plenty of text/info. I’m generally much better at processing the written words than I am at parsing the spoken words. So there’s probably a lot of variation among people.

When I make slides I’m also usually thinking of the many people that will download them after.

nicebyte.bsky.social•78 days ago

you can always put in speaker notes for people browsing slides offline! also, i can't help but feel that slides being available without the talk itself is a byproduct of a certain company putting the hard work of the presenters into a... vault.

impossible.bsky.social•77 days ago

This is really good! I am not a great or even good technical speaker, but I find that writing an outline that is not the same as your slides (and more detailed), and rehearsing from that multiple times to nail down your talking points and slide pacing to be helpful

impossible.bsky.social•77 days ago

https://bsky.app/profile/zeux.io/post/3lcv6rdaomc2w
Start from an outline and never write down an exact speech also helps the "read from the script" problem, which I agree is not good. I'd much rather have "ums" and "uhs" than stiff recital. If you're nervous it might help to have a written script for practice though

nothings.bsky.social•78 days ago

re: rehearsal, one way to look at it is that if you're giving a 1 hour talk to 100 people, you're using 100 hours of other people's time. if you can't rehearse 8-10 times and invest 10 of your hours in their 100, it's rude.

(I spent ~40 hours making slides & rehearsing my one GDC talk)

mathspp.com•73 days ago

I'm happy to say that there's a big overlap between your points and the ones I make in a similar article I wrote: “How I prepare a technical talk”.

I don't talk about diction issues and you highlight the care to be had when making jokes more.

If you're curious: http://mathspp.com/blog/how-i-prepare-a-technical-talk

mathspp.com•73 days ago

If you're not, no need to read my article 🤣

I think the main difference is that at the bottom I share some notes on how I typically prepare the content for my own talks.
The TLDR is: a lot of time thinking, then writing a blog post, then making slides.

zeux.io•78 days ago

Lightweight slides are great when attending the talk! They are also terrible if you want to skim the slides without listening.

Rehearsals are good but a lot of times I find people take them to the “read from the script” extreme. I personally find these just as bad; just give me the slides then.

briankaris.bsky.social•77 days ago

Matching multiple responses you’ve had I think a key problem for many tech talks from gamedevs is they should have been papers/tech reports/articles. The gamedev community did not come from academia. There is no culture of publishing papers in journals. For some reason our industry does talks.

briankaris.bsky.social•77 days ago

You can see this in the Advances course at SIGGRAPH being the primary way game stuff is published there. That GDC has no paper track and the talks are 50 mins instead of 20. This is coming from someone who’s last 2 talks were 70mins each. Too long. Should have been papers.

briankaris.bsky.social•77 days ago

That’s why you are seeing responses taking about people reading speaker notes afterward. Where they want more detail so they can read it. Slides aren’t for that! They are the visuals accompanying a talk!

briankaris.bsky.social•77 days ago

I wanted to get as much technical detail explained as I could. But that’s impossible to consume in person listening to someone. Too long, too dense. At least it is for me.

briankaris.bsky.social•77 days ago

I don’t mean talks are bad. They serve a different purpose. I think the 20min talk explaining the high level concept is great. Then for details refer to paper. Much of the issues you list I’ve struggled with in trying to fit everything I wanted to say into time limits.

briankaris.bsky.social•77 days ago

For me going forward, whenever I get to publishing the next thing it’ll be tech reports or blog posts. I’m at a different point in my career than others so this might apply differently to you. But I wish the expected format for gamedevs wasn’t the 50min gdc talk.

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