GDC 2026: What Experiential Marketing Can Learn From Gaming

By: Caroline Lee, Senior Strategist, InCZights Contributor

While I don’t make games for a living, I do design real‑world experiences for brands with stories to tell. This year at GDC, I wasn’t just walking the floor as a fan of games from publishers large and small. I hit the ground running as a strategist and researcher, taking notes on how game developers design for players with arcs, not attendees with badges, and how much smarter the experiential marketing industry could be if we borrowed their tools.

GDC is the gaming industry’s annual homecoming—a week where developers, artists, producers, audio engineers, business teams, marketing professionals, and platform partners congregate in San Francisco to swap notes about how games really get made.

On paper, it’s comprised of hundreds of talks, panels, and a Festival Hall expo floor, all where studios show work in progress. In reality, it behaves more like a micro‑city that reawakens every March: official sessions by day, award shows and concerts at night, and a third, crucial layer of meetups where the community customizes its own programming.

From Booth to Belief

On the floor, there’s a a sharp dichotomy between the brand pavilions of the behemoths and the pipe‑and‑drape and handmade set dressing of the scrappy indies.

One rare example of a booth that split the middle was Discord’s Mission CTRL experience, which made the most of a modest footprint by conjuring what felt like an entry to another realm. Mission CTRL struck the eye like a scene from a science fiction film, unifying real‑world cues and screen‑lit grandeur from NASA’s iconic 1969 command center with fantastical flair constructed from Discord’s unique DNA. The space was anchored by a single metaphor: every developer needs a launch strategy, and Discord gives them a launch center. One of the most immersive dimensions of the experience was the invisible layer: an in‑world soundscape of air‑traffic chatter, aircraft fly-bys, button pings and beeps, and retro gaming Easter eggs like 16‑bit coin sparkles and Mario leaps.

Photo Credit: Discord Developers

Nearby, Meta’s colorfully inviting space, with vertical panels that resembled open standing blinds, invited developers to unleash their creativity and literally shift their perspective before a wall of spherical, illusory mirrors.

Across the aisle, Tencent’s sprawling booth devoted an entire area to recruitment, featuring a well‑attended career counter beneath a graphic mantra reading “Spark More.” Even Meshy.ai, a fast‑rising 3D modeling platform, featured two brand cosplayers as a hat‑tip to the creative passion that thrums throughout Moscone all week.

Photo Credit: Tencent Games

But turn a corner into an alley of indie games, and the scene changes completely: university programs with students showing capstone games, tiny studios launching their first titles, and up‑and‑coming tools hoping to wedge themselves into the dev stack.

Often, the interactive details make a brand environment feel like a playable world. This is exactly where experiential can take nods from game design: rather than thinking of a booth as a static set, consider it as interactive level design that invites the player to explore and perhaps even leave their mark.

Senses Are Armchair Travel

Indie unit Atropos Studio quickly became my mental anchor for what’s possible on that smaller end of the spectrum. At a table lined with prints of stunning characters, guests could experience the studio’s latest demo, fragrance-inspired dating sim and visual novel Theoxis of my Realm that explores the intricacies of a perfumer’s craft. After playing, guests could pick up a fragrance sample, one of four custom scents tied to the game’s lead romanceable characters. This transformed a core truth of the game’s story into a multisensory micro‑experience that spilled out of fiction into reality, and perhaps unsurprisingly, it landed incredibly well with the game’s future target audience.

From an experiential standpoint, Atropos is a case study in less-is-more. Even with a small footprint, the game’s story centered around a richly compelling human insight—scent as story and connection—and the team committed to it IRL by translating it into a small yet potent interaction point, building an entire experience around one clear emotional vector instead of a laundry list of messages.

Reimagine Guests as Playable Characters

One aspect of GDC that feels consistently best‑in‑class is the speaker and panel programming, and ironically, it took missing a panel to see it. An Atropos developer described a talk she’d attended by the designers of Love and Deepspace, an otome‑style mobile game. The team focused on making the game genuinely gripping through exacting detail, and walked the audience through their decisions – like the detail of the characters’ shoes – to arrive there.

Hearing this, I made sure to attend the next Love and Deepspace session from InFold Games, in which Lizi Cheng, Producer and Partner at Papergames / InFold Games, walked the audience through how the team wields romance not just as a genre label, but as a mechanism to enhance and revolutionize existing game mechanics from other genres.

One guiding question during development: can we weave romance into combat itself, making a love interest feel present in high‑stakes moments and static date scenes? (If the Love and Deepspace player base of over 70 million players even now, two years after the game’s 2024 launch, is any indication, they most certainly did.)

Photo Credit: r/LoveAndDeepspace

High levels of variation in gameplay tend to be early hallmarks of successful games, and the best example of this in Cheng’s talk was tucked inside a simple claw‑machine mini-game. The point wasn’t to talk about the claw machine, but rather, to go deep on Love and Deepspace’s narrative branching and layers of detail; for instance, one character may love playing the game and hog the machine, and another may sit back and let you, the, player, take the lead.

Small variations in behavior let players feel like they’re interacting with a complex person, not a flat archetype. Their choices genuinely guide the narrative path and overall trajectory of the experience. We all know the delight of changing a choose‑your‑own‑adventure story through our decisions. Why should experiences be any different?

Design for Play

After witnessing game developers dialogue about focusing their storytelling on the player, it’s impossible to ignore the level of rigor and respect that experiences sometimes forego in favor of scale, polish, and first impressions.

In games, valuing the player’s time and attention is a survival requirement. If the loop isn’t satisfying, if the world doesn’t feel deep enough, or if the interactions don’t reward curiosity, players abandon the game.

Layer that human‑centric lens with the depth of player research and behavioral understanding on display at GDC, and a roadmap began to emerge for experiential: What could happen if we design experiences with the same obsession around world‑building and micro‑details that a great game studio pours into its levels and narratives? What if, instead of taking nods from fandom, we strived to authentically foster it?

Experiential doesn’t need to become a game to learn from game design– and don’t mistake this as a case for gamification. But we do need to start thinking more like game developers: define the player; build worlds, not backdrops; obsess over micro‑details; and design not just for throughput, but for stopping and playing awhile.

After last week, I’m already looking toward the next opportunity to keep asking what experiential can borrow, adapt, and reimagine from this universe of universes. Where will you venture next?

Photo Credit: Samsung Newsroom

Steal This Idea

If attendees were players, how would we design differently?

• Write the opening chapter of a player manual for your next event: a one‑page description of who the “player” is, what they want, and what “victory” looks like for them

• Prototype your experience like a level. Run a few people through a low‑fi version of your entry sequence and adjust based on where they stall or disengage

• Pick one micro‑detail to over‑invest in—a scent moment, a line of copy, a hidden interaction—and treat it with the obsession a game developer would bring to the table