Network, sure. Me and the 3 other developers here in Finland have good connections with each other...
I'm generally nervous around people, and usually most of these things cost $$$, and usually there isn't anything in Oregon. (IIRC the garage games indie thingy stopped a couple of years ago)
Me neither, but I just avoid the people who require a bullshit conversation as much as I can help it. I've spent some time at events with publisher types and ****ing hate it to be honest. I usually grab whatever drink they are buying, chat for a few minutes, start to listen to them drone on about women & cars & why they are the best in the industry, then find someone more interesting. They aren't all bad, but, well, actually they probably are.
I do a lot of networking, but I'm fortunate to be in Boston, which has a very active and large dev community. My take on networking is to not be fake. I tend to make friends relatively easily and be interested in other people's stuff, so I'm somewhat doing what comes naturally. Generally I just try to learn about what the interesting people I meet are doing, and if we have intersecting interests, we talk about that. If I know people that might be helpful to them with what they're doing/interested in, I try to get them together. If they want to talk about my stuff, also cool. Part and parcel with it all, I'm also on the local IGDA board now (we get ~150-200 people to each meeting, I think), I try to help students out with advice on how to "get in" or make games, and I've started co-organizing a dev conference. I've also started working at Betahouse, a small co-working place near Central Square - it gets me out of the house, and I am meeting a bunch of really awesome VC startup / hacker types that I otherwise wouldn't. These are all things I wanted to do, but that also work with trying to be a good networker.
If you count hanging out in forums as networking, well uh... yeah. This is the part i am weak at. How else do I go about networking to provide my programming services ?
People tend to say that I'm good at networking, although I don't think of it as networking. For me, it's just hanging out with like-minded people and discussing games. The first time I went to a game industry event, I ended up chatting with a bunch of guys about Metal Gear and we all started doing Solid Snake impressions. Several months later, one of them lands a writing job at a major game website and writes a nice feature about me and my recent game. Who knew? Don't think of it as "work" or "bullshitting." Just have fun!
Yeah, I think thats pretty much key. There are plenty of people who are interesting, funny and have something useful to say, so its generally easy to find those amongst game devs who tend to be a bit more that way than the general population.