I went to the “Dramatic Storytelling In Games” by Seamus Sullivan. I believe what stood out to me the most was his first point about world building. The first point was “Make the environment say something about the characters, and vice versa.” For this point, he talked about the game Myst. As you play through the game, you find some seriously creepy things about the two characters that you are trying to “free” from a book they are trapped in. He mentioned that you find things such as furniture made out of bones. The world you are in eventually reveals to you that these two men are seriously shady characters and probably would do you great harm if you freed them from their captivity.

For the “vice versa” of this tip, he talked about how Portal 2 uses the character Wheatley to show things about the world in which you are placed. As Wheatley first comes in to where you, the character, have been “hibernating,” it is obvious alone from his tone of voice and strange way of saying things that something is drastically wrong in the world of Aperture Laboratories. It is also obvious, by the mere fact that a robot is running the place, that a huge amount of time has passed and there are absolutely no other human beings around to keep things under control. The world has fallen into disarray. The player gets all of this just from a few minutes of game play at the beginning, interacting with one character alone.

I could say so much more about this conference, but this will have to suffice. I thoroughly enjoyed everything Seamus Sullivan had to say about storytelling in games.