By Winifred Phillips | Contact | Follow
Hi! I’m video game composer Winifred Phillips, and this past September I traveled to Washington D.C. I’d been asked, as the current winner of the Grammy Award for Best Video Game Soundtrack, to speak in the Congressional Auditorium of the Capitol Building, at an event advocating for the importance of video game music. It was an enormous honor! Alongside a panel of fellow Grammy Award winners and nominees, we discussed the process of composing for games, sharing stories and memories while doing our best to help lawmakers understand the inherent creativity and expertise involved in crafting a video game musical score.
Participating in panels and discussions like this one has always been very inspiring for me. I’m grateful to be a part of this amazing professional network of game audio wizards, as they continually innovate and share ideas with boundless enthusiasm and generosity. Through a lively exchange of ideas over time, the game audio profession has built a deep reservoir of knowledge and experience that enriches the entire community. With that in mind, I’d like to use this article to share a collection of resources that I’ve gathered from across the internet, providing both educational enrichment and inspiration for game audio folks. We’ll start with a collection of informative conferences that include rich game audio content. Then, we’ll move to an assortment of music festivals and symphony concerts dedicated to music from video games. We’ll include a couple of awesome organizations that are serving the needs of game audio scholars and researchers. And finally, we’ll lay out all the vibrant online discussion forums and helpful communities ready to assist game audio practitioners. So let’s get started!
the GDC Vault: a repository of lecture videos from the long history of the conference. During Showcase week, GDC curated a selection of lectures from their illustrious history and spotlighted those talks in live-streams accompanied by enthusiastic text discussions in an accompanying chat box. One of my lectures from a previous GDC event was featured during this GDC Showcase, and I was happy to participate in the chat discussion, answering questions and providing additional resources. My lecture was entitled, “Homefront to God of War: Using Music to Build Suspense,” and 
and I was able to land the gig because an example of my work landed on the desk of a music supervisor for the project at exactly the right time. What are the chances of that? It’s akin to being struck by lightning, and I certainly can’t advise young composers to depend on that kind of lightning to strike. But I don’t want to leave hopeful young composers in the lurch either.
