GDC, Monday, Day Two.

The first two days of GDC are all about summits and tutorials. There is a summit for just about every thing there is in the game developer community.

Writers,

Game Designers,

Education,

Mobile.

Indie,

And more.

The stuff you’ll mostly see me talk about is the writer summit. I won’t give you the long history of how the summit came to be. Instead, I’ll tell you about some of the interesting talks I attended today and suggest you check out if you have access to the GDC Vault.

The first talk was Computers are terrible storytellers-give the human a chance by Stephen Hood, who went into detail about how he borrowed from different tabletop story telling games and applied it to a video game narrative.

The next talk was called Cinematic games are dead! Long live cinematic games! By Matthew Weise, who’s talk mirrored and reinforced Hood’s talk. Weise went on to talk about working within constraints and using things like ambiguity and blank space / white space, were the player can fill in the blanks with their own imagination, to tell a compelling narrative.

Heather Albano’s talk, Harvesting Interactive Fiction, showed that interactive novels were still on the rise and also pointed out some of things that Hood and Weise talked about. She stated that a good interactive novel allows the player to fill in the blanks while still providing a rich narrative drive world.

Breakaway: A narrative games success by addressing gender-based violence is probably one of the most interesting talks on how narrative created the game-play. Ann DeMarle spoke about how her team wanted to create a game that stopped bullying in developing countries and the challenges they faced creating an internationally/culturally acceptable game for young kids.

There were several more talks I saw but these four stuck with me. About half way through the day I started to fall asleep. Switching from a night shift to staying way during the day was a little rougher than I thought.

Every year the writers find a hangout spot where we can all gather and talk about the day or catch up. This year we’re at the Golden Tab Room. So if you’re looking to hangout and meet a bunch of interesting people, stop by. If you’re worried about meeting new people, still stop on by. We’re a friendly bunch and we can talk about a lot of things other than writing. I promise.

Until tomorrow, my friends!