Tuesday: I went to several AI panels; they were fun, but mostly not related to what I write about here, except by loose analogy. (When AI goes wrong, it goes really really wrong, though.)
Richard Rouse III gave a talk on dynamic stories for games, with shoutouts to some IF work, Versu and Prom Week, and Sam Ashwell’s CYOA types. (Gamasutra writeup here.)
Sam Barlow talked on Her Story: the research that went into the project, the use of mystery and player imagination to fill gaps, etc.(Gamasutra writeup.)
To me, the most compelling moment was the slide of the spreadsheet he used to track word use and figure out which elements needed to be changed. I could really have gone for a 20-30 minute deep dive just into that aspect of the writing. (Hypothesis: because Her Story was successful and looks simple, there will probably be ripoffs, and they will probably be terrible. There is a lot of invisible craft that goes into the word choice to make the game function as it does, and someone careless about that issue could get it very wrong.)
Also, here’s Gamasutra on lessons from Tarn Adams and Tanya Short, which I include because I wanted (but failed) to get into their Monday talk on procedural generation of mythology.
Wednesday I attended fewer talks, though I did catch Jane Ng on the art of Firewatch — which drove home how much of the space design is driven by the need to have discrete map sections to load and unload, rather than long vistas across the entire map. At the same time, a lot of that design was fairly story-focused. Landmark locations have narrative payoff, which corresponds to how people think about remembering travel. You remember moving from one interesting spot to another; so the interesting spots are both physically cool and also significant to the story.
Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling 
When AI goes wrong, it goes really really wrong, though.
…they just debuted Skynet at GDC?
There was a particularly good bug story involving many automated medic NPCs using a defibrillator, which fired like a weapon, on the same initial victim; the function of the defibrillator was to toggle people between “normal” and “unconscious, rag-doll state”; the defib bolts started hitting random bystanders, making them unconscious and thus candidates for further defib action; and all this took place on top of a hill. The phrase “rolling ball of unconscious medics” appeared in the talk.
Thanks for jotting down your reflections. It’s a pleasure for those of us far away, to see these events though an IF enthusiast lens.