…starts Monday! I will be there:
I’m giving a game design postmortem about Versu Friday morning (10 AM, Room 3005 West Hall). I’ll be talking about several aspects of the design, including some UI issues with presenting text games that I haven’t previously blogged about here.
Richard Evans and I will be showing Versu gameplay off at the Experimental Gameplay Workshop (Friday, 2:30-4:30 PM, Room 2014 West Hall). As that’s always one of my favorite sessions, I’m especially happy to be doing it. The EGW always features a surprising and cool collection of gameplay styles and concepts.
And finally
I will also have a shorter stint at the Indie Soapbox, where I will talk some about text games. (Tuesday, 4:30-5:30 PM, Room 2005, West Hall.)
Several other sessions caught my eye as potentially interesting for IF folks:
Clara Fernandez-Vara, a Boston PR-IFer and IF outreach advocate, is part of the Game Educators’ Rant session.
Porpentine (howling dogs et al) and Terry Cavanagh (Don’t Look Back, Super Hexagon) are talking about indie game curation and outsider voices.
There is a poster session by Mordechai Buckman about the potential of interactive fiction using “a tool for turning story scenarios into intuitive gameplay.” I’m not sure what to expect from this one, but we’ll see.
Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy talk about the evolution of Kentucky Route Zero from a largely puzzly graphical adventure game to its somewhat more mysterious current form.
Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin on Telltale’s The Walking Dead also sounds very much worth a look (I’m especially vexed it’s scheduled opposite the Game Design Challenge session, which I typically make a point of attending — but hey, it’s all about presenting the player with hard choices, right?).
I usually enjoy the GDC Microtalks, a brain-dazzlingly rapid presentation by numerous speed-talking speakers. This year the lineup includes Anna Anthropy, Leigh Alexander (a games journalist who, among other things, has written extensively about IF and text gaming), and Tom Bissell.
And, of course, there’s the entire Game Narrative Summit, moved to San Francisco GDC this year. Formerly it was a feature of GDC Online in Austin.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
I’m really looking forward to seeing your demonstrations of Versu on Friday – I’ve been dying to see Versu in action since you started talking about it, but sadly I have no iPad.
Regarding my poster session: what I’m arguing for is an approach to interactive storytelling which rejects traditional gameplay loops in favor of continuously looking at what the lead character is experiencing, and finding a way to simulate that sequence of experiences in gameplay. I’ve written a number of games as supplemental materials to my presentation, to show how different kinds of interfaces can be used to simulate different kinds of moments in a story. Apologies for the unclear summary.
Oh, I know it can be very hard to fit a description of a complex project into a brief description; I didn’t mean to diss, just to indicate that I didn’t know enough about the project to really comment beyond what was in the GDC writeup.
Anyway, that does sound interesting — thanks for the followup and clarification!
Emily, do they video any of these talks?
They do, though typically you have to have GDC Vault access to watch them, which means having bought a pass to some GDC in the past year. If you work for a company that sends someone, you may be able to watch vault content over a coworker’s shoulder; otherwise, I dunno. (Sorry. I wish these things were more open-access myself.)
Also, I suspect this year I will once again attempt to write up as much of the good stuff as I can and then tragically run out of energy before I’ve had a chance to do all of it. But we’ll see.
Thanks for the info. I guess I understand a degree of reticence to share all their material when it could take away from people’s motivation to attend in person. On the other hand, some of us were never able to fly across the world to attend in the first place :)
Have a good time! Surprise-hug Tim Schafer for me!
Hi Emily! Just wanted to let you know that Kotaro Uchikoshi gave an interesting talk about visual novel design at the recent GDC.There’s a an article about it on Siliconera if you’re interested (I’m not posting the URL because WordPress may think it’s a spam, but i’t easy to find)
Keep up the good work.
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