I attended Laura Packer’s presentation from 4:30 to 6:00 pm. Laura Packer first and foremost is a story teller, and a phenomenal one at that. In her presentation she outlined the history of storytelling and how it is the human races first real form of communication, dating back to prehistoric times. Story telling taps into a experiential part of your brain and makes you tap into your experiences and past to help make a story your own.
Ms. Packer told the audience a story about the day she met the devil. The devil didn’t have red horns or a long pointed tail. The devil also didn’t smell like brim stone, but rather Channel number 5. This was just the very beginning of her story but as you can see your senses and imagination are already at work. You can almost smell the Channel perfume or brim stone when you are told this information. Ms. Packer never actually tells you what the devil fully looks like but rather gives you little pieces and allows you to fill in the rest. The blank space that she leaves for you to use to create your own image is what she calls “white space”. It is this “white space” that allows you to become deeply emerged into a story by adding your own twist or perception of it, and in turn makes the story more of your own.
In regards to gaming, she argues that gaming is very good at telling a story, but how good is it emerging you into it and making you own the story yourself. Often video games give you every little detail from the characters outfit to the fight scenes to whats happening and so on. She challenged all the game designers to try to make games that they could leave enough white space somehow in order to make each story their own. She figured the plot of the story would be a good place to start, but she also wasn’t too sure how this could fully be done. In looking at games with alternate endings based off the choices you make in the game, she found that this was the closest to the idea she was looking for. However, the games endings are not truly all endless based on the players choices. There are a set number. Unfortunately right now we do not have the technology to make a game with a purely infinite number of endings.
In regards to how I felt about her presentation, I loved it. She was very entertaining and engaged the audience in a way that i hadn’t expected. I would suggest that if anyone gets the chance to listen to her again then they should take that opportunity.