A PFOG 2026 Retrospective

3/20/26

I feel like PFOG went really well. I’ve never run something of this scale before, and I had this weird feeling of it being “easier” than I thought it would be. It was also much harder and more exhausting than I thought it would be too. For me, a lot of event organizing seems to be burning reserves of energy and motivation. I specifically chose events and formats that would minimize our organizational burden too.

I want to think through everything now that I’ve got some time to my self. I want to figure out how PFOG works into the future as well.

Philosophy:

• I like the 4 pages of The Timeless Way of Building that I have read. The essence of which seems to suggest identifying our pattern language and growing organically with those patterns.
• In the The Timeless Way of Building spirit, when I attend events they feel not-alive to me. I think this is more of a culture mismatch between myself and the events than anything else. Plenty of people seem to attend and enjoy the events I did not enjoy.
• PFOG did feel alive to me. I want to work on identifying that pattern language. I want to help it keep growing.
• I heard from many people throughout the event about how they wanted to help. They wanted to know how to keep the feelings from PFOG going. I think this indicates it felt alive to other participants too.
• I think there’s probably some inarticulable theory that describes why PFOG felt alive. I’m pulling this idea from the Theory building view of programming. I think The Timeless Way of Building talks about this idea a bit. I’m not deep enough in that book to know though. I do think that part of the pattern language is to find good things that repeat and lead you to the living vision. You couldn’t articulate the vision in totality, you have to iterate to it.
• So, rather that trying to explicitly figure out stuff like “who is the audience for PFOG?” and “what made PFOG special?”, I think I should look for small patterns that we did that made the event happen.
• The starts of a pattern language?
  • This event was relatively spontaneous.
  • This event invited community members to participate in organization.
  • This event conflicted with a more popular event (GDC) making it “Portland first” in a way.
  • Invitations were primarily distributed via word of mouth.
  • Events were held around town, not in a centralized location. Main events were both nearby in SE though.
  • I was pretty actively involved in pre-show emceeing, facilitating, getting people organized. Pushing stuff to happen.
  • Events were pretty small and intimate. Events around town were in the 5-10 people range.Tent pole events were 25ish people range.
  • PFOG was a one time event. An annual festival.
• I’m sure there is a lot of other stuff I have not identified in the above list. I’m also sure some of those things are more important than others. It seems likely that they’re not even all contributing positively to the living feeling I’m searching for.

What to do with PFOG in the future?

• I want to do another PFOG! This was a lot of fun. It seems to have been received really well. It seems like now that we know what we’re doing, we could do it a little bit bigger and more planned out.
• People resonated with PFOG’s brand and the vibe at the events. I understand why people want to keep the spirit going all year, but I think it is important that PFOG is a specific event and not a larger community.
• So, I think PFOG should continue to be a single festival. Probably in a similar format to this year’s.
  • Maybe with different timing. I want to get community feedback on these parts.
    • The conflict with GDC is nice in some ways. It helps this event feel aggressively local. It’s about Portland. It helped people in town deal with some FOMO around missing GDC as well, so that’s a nice community support feeling too.
    • That said, there are also Portlanders who went to GDC and wanted to be at PFOG too. GDC is a pretty necessary event for commercial developers and it feels bad to me to exclude them from PFOG because of this conflict.
  • I think there is magic in this being a specific event in time instead of it becoming more of a community spread throughout the year.

So what about the rest of the year?

• I do also resonate with the feeling that PFOG gave me the kind of event going experience I’ve been missing in town for a while now.
• I want to help support that.
• One of my goals with PFOG was actually to get other people to start organizing stuff. I want to go to events that feel alive, and I do not want to turn into a year round event planner.
  • I think this event proved that other people can organize events. I think it also showed me that I had to take a pretty active role in prodding events to make them happen.
  • I want to figure out how to keep providing space and encouragement for people to throw cool, living events in the PFOG spirit.
• The first step for this, I think, is for me to work on PDX Makes Games as a space to celebrate and support event organizers and community members in town.

PDX Makes Games

• I haven’t really been resonating with tech and gaming events the same way since the pandemic. Maybe before, who knows, but it certainly crystalized when I looked around a few years ago and just wasn’t that interested in the things happening around me any more.
• I started thinking the solution might just be to try and run my own events to try and figure out what I liked.
• Last year, I took a baby step in that direction and ran the PDX Games Census. It was a modest success. I know it reached only a tiny fraction of game makers in town, but as a first attempt it got ~40 respondents. And that was pretty encouraging.
  • I’m not sure how useful the survey data actually was to be honest. The primary feeling I got from the survey was that “people want some kind of events in town” and not much more haha.
  • The other main benefit as that most of the survey participants opted to provide their email addresses to learn about future games-related events in Portland.
• PDX Makes Games is the site I built originally to host the census link and results.
• It also has the landing page for PFOG.
• I think it makes sense to me to expand this entity to be a sort of “umbrella” that tries to promote events like PFOG around town all year round.

Specifics:

• PDX Makes Games
  • Put up a community calendar and newsletter
  • Anyone who organizes a PFOG event becomes an Organizer
  • Any Organizer can put events on the community calendar
  • Anyone who attends a PDX Makes Games event and is endorsed by an Organizer can also become an Organizer
  • Anyone can organize an event at each PFOG event without explicit endorsement
  • PFOG Admins get final management decisions over organizers and events to ensure they continue to feel alive. We’ll work over time to make these criteria clearer, but I do think it is inherently nebulous.
• PFOG Discord remains open all year to organize events outside of PFOG.
  • I don’t think it makes sense to rebrand this to a PDX Makes Games Discord. I think PFOG is a stronger brand and community organized events are very relevant to PFOG proper, any way.
  • We’ll move the current channels into an archived PFOG-2026 section.
  • We’ll add a new general discussion section.
  • We’ll add a speculative ideas channel for PFOG-2027.
  • We’ll add an #organizers channel to help event planning year round
• PFOG
  • We’ll send out a post event survey to get community feedback.
  • We’ll start planning a bigger PFOG 2027.