I managed to attend nearly all the sessions at the conference, but I was recording video of the presentations and workshops, so I didn’t really get to pay as much attention or participate as much as I would have liked. The ones that stuck out most to me were Ken Rolston’s key note presentation, Laura Pecker’s workshop; Improvisational Story Telling for Game Development, and Keaven Freeman’s workshop; Quest Crafting: Maximizing Impact without a Wall of Text. Ken’s speech was really interesting and I never thought that so much about game writing can be learned from table top and paper game storytelling and overall design. As a want to be Game Designer I found that he had a lot of really good points for writing story for RPG’s, which as he said is the hardest genre of game to write for. I was a little disappointed that his presentation and all the others that I attended focused on writing for the genre of RPG or MMORPG. It would have been nice to get a taste of how writing may be different when you are working with designing a Strategy game, First Person Shooter, Point and Click adventure, etc.
What I loved so much about Laura Pecker’s workshop was that it was fun, and really helped me find my inner creativity. For those of you who did not attend we did small group collective story telling exercises that focused on speed and unpredictability. She said that whenever you find yourself stuck in a rut with your plot or a character, to try out one of these exercises to see what possibilities you can come up with.
Keaven Freeman’s workshop was about designing quests that are fairly deep and complex, and how to streamline events and dialogue so that you do not bore the player with walls of text explaining what they must do. He said that the best way to say things about your game world or characters is to not say it at all. Instead of telling a player that a character does this or that, show them and have other characters in the world react and talk about things to give the player a hint without spilling the beans in front of them outright. This was a point also made by Seamus Sullivan in his presentation on good dialogue. In all I felt that I learned a lot about game and character design, tools to good storytelling and dialogue, writer to player relations, and a bunch about what exactly it means to be a writer or designer for a game.