DICE 2007 Conversation Tracking

I conducted an experiment this year at DICE where I kept track of everyone who I had a significant conversation with. Those of you who were there and kept seeing me jot notes to myself, I apologize, that’s what I was doing!
I did it for three reasons: first, I feel like I have a horrible memory for names and faces, and I wanted to see how many people’s names I’d actually forgotten; second, I know that writing things down helps me to remember them; and third, I wanted to see how many new people I talked with versus people I know and catch up with at each show.
The results were interesting. I met and talked with 99 people over the 3 days. Of those 99 people, there were 14 whose names I couldn’t remember at first meeting. However, 7 of those I recalled after a brief moment, as I matched a person’s features to what I remembered from the last time I had seen them. I’m giving myself a passing grade on this, as I actually did better than I thought I would. 🙂
Of those 99, only 7 people were new folks whom I hadn’t met before. I love catching up with friends at industry conferences, and this exercise made me realize that perhaps I need to start introducing myself to people I haven’t met more often. There are a lot of folks out there in the industry doing great things, and I want to meet them!
Being able to catch up with 99 important game industry members at one conference over three days is an amazing return on investment. Couple that with the actual material at the DICE Summit itself, and it made for one heck of a conference!
I promise I won’t continue this exercise… but it was a lot of fun. 🙂