Schedule

See the schedule in grid form.

All times are shown in US Eastern time.

Friday (June 9)

Our workshop schedule is still under construction. Stay tuned!

Saturday (June 10)

    • Break
      (11:00–11:30 (US Eastern))
    • Narrative Meets Multiplayer: Creating a Social Narrative Experience – Yoyu Li
      (11:30–12:30 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      For the game Whispers in the West, we embarked on a journey that few have taken: an online co-op point-and-click game. We’ll discuss our custom multiplayer engine and the challenges we faced: nonlinear multiplayer narrative, meaningful social experiences, and multiplayer testing.
    • Trust, Lust, and UST: Writing Effective Romance in Games – Amanda Gardner
      (11:30–12:30 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      The Deep End Games’s Narrative Director (and secret romance author) Amanda Gardner explains her individual method of how to bring the heat into games. We’ll go into detail about tackling relationships in the upcoming game, Romancelvania, and the tenets of just what makes the audience lean in and swoon for your characters. We’ll also deconstruct some of pop culture’s most iconic pairings to understand what elements work, and what doesn’t. Ultimately, it’s a balance of trust, lust, and the all important UST.
    • T. Tanzi and Last Match: Immersive v. Interactive Theatre – John M. Withers IV
      (11:30–11:45 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Trafford Tanzi (1983) and The Last Match: A Pro Wrestling Rock Musical (2022) are both Immersive musicals about wrestling. By comparing them to each other, and to the experience of live wrestling shows, we will examine the distinction between Immersion and Interactive Theatre.
    • Civil Disobedience in Games – Luis Garcia
      (11:45–12:00 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Many video games let players bend rules and break laws. Many treat subversive acts as crimes that the player can commit for selfish gains; but a few present them as acts of protest or civil disobedience. I argue that this latter representation is an effective means for inviting players to explore ethical dilemmas and to empathize with the disadvantaged.
    • You Should Be Larping More (If You Want To Exercise Your Interactive Narrative Muscles) – Ben Books Schwartz
      (12:00–12:15 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      I am here to encourage narrative designers to larp more. Play larps! Write larps! Run larps! Big larps, small larps, larps in your living room, all of them. I’ll talk about specific larp skillsets: treating players as collaborators, learning to work with other artistic fields, thinking about narratives that can flex fluidly as players make choices.
    • Choices of the Oppressed: Writing Choice-Based Fiction Using Theatre of the Oppressed Methods to Enable Muslim Minorites and Challenge Majority Assumptions – Javeria Kausar
      (12:15–12:30 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is an interactive form which enables spectators to replace a play’s oppressed protagonist and try strategies to overcome oppression. This becomes a rehearsal that inspires real-life action. Choice-based fiction can incorporate related qualities. Of course stark differences between TO and choice-based fiction exist. But I believe that taking TO as a loose framework for choice-based fiction can be a helpful starting point.
    • Lunch
      (12:30–13:30 (US Eastern))
    • When Theater Is A Game – David Kuelz
      (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      What would Sleep No More look like if it existed alongside augmented reality mechanics like those in Pokémon Go? How could musicals like Wicked incorporate player choice and agency? We’ll discuss the advantages and pitfalls of combining live theater with game mechanics, as well as design, storytelling, and production methodologies that yielded success.
    • The Little Engine That Could: The History of the Adventure Game Studio Engine, Games, and Community – Edmundo Ruiz Ghanem
      (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      Adventure Game Studio (AGS) is one of the most popular point-and-click adventure game engines. Originally released to the public in 1997, it has a long history of updates, community, creators, and games. The engine has democratized the creation of adventure games. But nobody outside the community knows its history. How many of these games were not merely created by individuals working solo, but by a community who helped each other along the way?
    • Cataloging Narrative Games to Expand the Bibliographic Universe – Colin Post
      (13:30–13:45 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Last year I detailed the efforts and challenges involved in collecting digitally-distributed narrative games at an academic library. Now, having acquired approximately 25 narrative games for the library collection, I have been working with librarians to promote discovery and access of these works. I’ll share some examples of the catalog records created, discuss significant decisions we made in how to describe the titles, and consider the implications for more widespread cataloging of narrative games.
    • Spontaneously Inspired: How Dadaism May Energize Narrative Design – Alejandro Ruiz del Sol
      (13:45–14:00 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      The art movement Dadaism challenged the relationship between audience/art. Let’s compare that challenge to the relationship between designer/player in narrative design. How can narrative design be inspired by the subversive art of Dada?
    • “You”: Addressing the Reader-Player-Character in Twentieth-Century Texts – Pamela Weidman
      (14:00–14:15 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      One hallmark of IF is its second-person address to “you” the player. Many IF works experiment with this and make the player reconsider their relation to the player-character and the game. Let’s compare this to the twentieth-century tradition of experimental writing: Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Jamaica Kincaid. I propose that IF offers a particularly rich elaboration of Roland Barthes’ foundational literary theory of “playing with the text”.
    • Representing Disability and Depicting Ableism in Video Games – Hélène Sellier
      (14:15–14:30 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Representations of disability in video games are often problematic and hurtful. Serious games in this area often adopt a medical and category-based perspective of disabilities, focusing on impairments. How can we depict disability as a social experience? How do we let the player share that experience without appropriating it? We’ll look at the narrative puzzle game Alix et Yanis: la disparition d’Albert le hamster, intended for young schoolchildren.
    • Break
      (14:30–15:00 (US Eastern))
    • Cairns & Keystones: Building Interactive Narrative Non-linearly – Ben Schneider
      (15:00–16:00 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      Keystone-arch development builds a story like it’s told, from start to end. Cairn-stone interactive narrative places the key moments first, balancing smaller moments on top of those. Saying goodbye to the rigidity and fragility of the linear opens up a world of possibility. It translates the task into the native tongue of agency and interactivity.
    • Endless Stories, Impossible Structures: Conflict and Plot in Mobile F2P Games – Luciano Salerno
      (15:00–16:00 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      Story-driven F2P mobile games know that, to succeed over time, their stories can never truly end. How do they build a narrative without an ending? Or alternatively, how can we continue our stories once the tension created by the conflict is released? Can we perhaps never solve that conflict? Ultimately, are third acts necessary at all?
    • Procedural Prohibition: Bringing Story Generation into a Simulation Game – Matthew Viglione
      (15:00–16:00 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Our latest game, City of Gangsters, is a narrative-heavy game that’s also a tycoon simulation game. We’ll explore how we tried to create a game that seeks to tell stories like The Godfather but where every new game is a unique, novel city with different characters and stories waiting to be discovered.
    • Break
      (16:00–16:30 (US Eastern))
    • 6 “Cons” of Worldbuilding: a Practical Approach to Structured Creation – Gerben Grave
      (16:30–17:30 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      In 2021, I did a GDC talk called “Connected Worlds: Building Dynamic Storyworlds Using Network Theory” which showed how networks can be used to build coherent and consistent worlds. Following this line of thinking further, I ended up with an approach that combines literary theory, network theory, and sociology, wrapped in the mnemonic device of the Six Cons: Concept, Constraints, Content, Connections, Conflict and Consequences.
    • Designing Narrative Strategy for 4 to 4,000 Players – Nick Bush
      (16:30–17:30 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      King of the Castle is a multiplayer narrative game where a Twitch streamer plays a Monarch ruling over a semi-democratic medieval kingdom. The game requires at least four players: one Monarch and one Noble from each region. But there is no real upper limit to players. In our private beta, we’ve had roughly 3,500 people playing a single game on Twitch. How do these two vastly different scenarios play out? How do you design for such a gulf in player experience?
    • “Don’t Try to Explain It” - Why Some Things Should Not Make Sense – Bjarke Alexander Larsen
      (16:30–17:30 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Why does punching a tree give you planks? How do the champions in a League of Legends match keep being able to fight each other? We often accept things like these in games with a refrain of “Don’t think about it too hard,” which conflicts with our desire to explain the logic of our narratives in virtual worlds. We want the world to make sense. But should we?

Sunday (June 11)

    • Thematic Puzzle Design: Learning from Erstwhile, Sub Rosa, and more – Aster Fialla
      (10:00–11:00 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      How do you design puzzles to reinforce the themes of your game? In Erstwhile (2018), we accidentally designed a game where the singular puzzle of piecing together memories reinforced the theme of being haunted by the past. How do we intentionally support the underlying thematic message of a game through its puzzle design? Join me in breaking down puzzles and extracting thematically significant meanings from every piece within.
    • How the West Was Many: Crafting a Culturally Diverse Western Adventure with Rosewater – Jess Haskins
      (10:00–11:00 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      At Narrascope and AdventureX, I’ve spoken about the importance of creating with cultural awareness, and why small teams and solo indies shouldn’t be afraid of going “out of bounds” to write outside their own personal backgrounds. In this talk I will discuss how our team of two put this theory into practice in making our forthcoming point-and-click adventure. Rosewater is set in an alternate-history world inspired by the American Old West, but aiming to thoughtfully depict a diverse range of people and experiences often left out of traditional Westerns. I’ll talk about what approaches worked, what didn’t, the gap between theory and practice — and how we can do better next time.
    • Designing a Narrative-Driven Video Game to Build Resilience in Children who Stutter – Erik X. Raj
      (10:00–11:00 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Speech-language pathologists who provide therapy to children who stutter can benefit from using narrative-driven video games in therapy. Those video games often put players in active positions where they are able to read through meaningful dialogue that ultimately helps the video game’s character to move forward toward new levels. The positive experiences of not giving up and eventually moving forward within a video game are usable as therapeutic talking points. We’ll discuss the rationale for designing a narrative-driven game, Jump Rogi, to build resilience in children who stutter.
    • Break
      (11:00–11:30 (US Eastern))
    • Take That! The Multicultural Origins of the Ace Attorney Series – Clara Fernandez-Vara
      (11:30–12:30 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      The Ace Attorney game series recently turned 20 years old, after eleven games that put the player in the shoes of different lawyers across time and in different countries. Their success and longevity is built on top of rich cultural references that can be traced back to adventure games from the 1980s, as well as the Western whodunit, Japanese detective novels (honkaku), and Perry Mason. We’ll explore how texts from different media enter in dialogue with narrative design, challenging players to solve their mysteries within specific traditions of detective fiction.
    • How to End the World: A Post-Mortem of RuneScape 3’s 2022 Season Finale – Diana Flindt
      (11:30–12:30 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      The live MMO-RPG Runescape 3 attempted to pull off an epic high-fantasy story throughout its 2021-22 season of content, the Elder God Wars. The universe eaters were awake and coming to kill us all — and only our players can stop them. I’ll share what went wrong, what went right, and lessons learned from building an end-of-the-world story in a live game. What are the unique narrative challenges of trying to create a satisfying ending in an ongoing live game?
    • On Goncharov (1973): Fact and (Interactive) Fiction – Autumn Chen
      (11:30–11:45 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Goncharov is a collective storytelling phenomenon which escaped the confines of Tumblr and made its way into the mainstream. My part in this was hosting and participating in the Goncharov Game Jam. I’ll describe the trends and themes of these games and how they relate more broadly to fandom.
    • Gorogoa: O’ Sensemaking Machine – Joey Centofanti
      (11:45–12:00 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      A narrative and gamic analysis of Gorogoa (2017). Frames are the fundamental building block of Gorogoa: the idea that players can advance only by adopting fresh, new perspectives. Can we extend this to question the frameworks that we use to design games in the first place?
    • Cuentitos: a Storylet Engine with Probability at its Core – Fran Tufro
      (12:00–12:15 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      While developing our upcoming game we needed a fresh approach to narrative that supported exploration of probabilistic narrative spaces, so I developed a small narrative engine extending the storylet concept to support probability and large narrative arcs.
    • Narrative-Based Games for Sexual Health – KB
      (12:15–12:30 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      A post-mortem of my game (val)iant: or, val’s guide to having a broken vag. It’s a game about vaginismus, relationships, and how we as a society learn about sex. We’ll discuss ways that we bring education into narrative. What can narrative games teach players? How do they accomplish this? What are the unexpected outcomes?
    • Lunch
      (12:30–13:30 (US Eastern))
    • Going Union: How A Basement Indie Hired AAA Talent (And How You Can, Too!) – Francisco González
      (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      Plenty of narrative games feature voice acting. Smaller and indie teams tend to cast non-union actors. While this is a perfectly acceptable approach, the quality and professionalism that union actors offer is undeniable. In this talk, I want to dispel the assumption that working with union actors is prohibitively expensive, as well as clear up some common misconceptions.
    • SweepWeave: A Synthesis of Storylets and Simulated Characters – Sasha Fenn
      (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      SweepWeave is an experimental, free, and open source toolkit for creating works of interactive fiction. It focuses on character interaction as the central game mechanic. Games employ these simulated characters and relationships to assemble pieces of handcrafted content into a coherent narrative shaped, in part, by player choice. While games made in SweepWeave use a hypertext interface, the SweepWeave storyworld editor itself uses an “inverse parser,” (inspired by Chris Crawford’s work) in an attempt to avoid coding hassles and to help authors spend more of their time writing, scripting, and sculpting compelling characters and narratives.
    • According to Cain: From Concept to Completion – Jim Nelson
      (13:30–14:30 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      Does a video game based on the Book of Genesis have a place in the 21st century? I’ll discuss the formative ideas that led to developing the parser game According to Cain, which placed 6th in the IF Comp and 1st place in its Miss Congeniality award. I’ll discuss the problems of writing a “religious” mystery game from a secular perspective, using graphics and music in a parser-based game, the restrictions I placed on myself, and the restrictions I found myself faced with.
    • Break
      (14:30–15:00 (US Eastern))
    • Narrative Design in the Age of Twitch – Stacey Mason
      (15:00–16:00 (US Eastern), Ballroom)
      Traditional wisdom is that competitive multiplayer games are more inherently “streamable” than narrative games. Indeed many aspects of narrative games seem to be at odds with streaming experiences. Will the audience be able to duck into a storyline partway through? Will a streamed storyline spoil the core of the game or cut into sales? Yet many narrative games do very well on Twitch. How do their narrative structures aid or hinder this?
    • Horror Games: Lore VS Gameplay – Cam
      (15:00–16:00 (US Eastern), Room 540)
      Some horror games become popular due to their lore, even when their gameplay is almost non-existent. What about these games pulls people in so much? Is it a well crafted story, built to drawn in players? Or is it the lack of story that allows players to go full detective mode?
    • My Game Is A Joke, And I Demand To Be Taken Seriously – Martin Hanses
      (15:00–16:00 (US Eastern), Room 548)
      What is the artistic merit of a game that only tries to amuse you? What are the politics of comedy as a narrative genre in games, and how does it differ from other media? This talk covers perspectives on messaging, emotional weight, and personal biases in comical narratives, as well as how to avoid turning both yourself and the game you’re making into a punchline.
    • Break
      (16:00–16:30 (US Eastern))
    • Wrap-up
      (16:30–17:30 (US Eastern), Ballroom)