July 18, 2008
A Meeting in Austin About the Future (of Story in Games)
This September will be the third Game Writers Conference, now called the Writing for Games Track, part of the annual Austin GDC. The theme this year is “The Future of Storytelling in Games”, and includes intriguing lecture titles and topics such as “Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing Great Game Characters”, “New Interfaces, New Gamewriting Opportunities”, “Writing for Socially Networked Games: Blending User-Generated Content with Storytelling”, “The Play is the Thing: Interactive Storytelling from the World of Improv Comedy”, “Special Ops: The Writer of the Future”, and many more.
I’m looking forward to giving a talk called “Linearity is Hell: Achieving Truly Dynamic Stories in Games”, where I will probably say things the audience will not want to hear, and generally challenge the mindset behind the term “interactive storytelling”.
Also, speaking of game companies as machines, I see that Ken Perlin is in the Online Games track talking about “Interactive Actors That Express Emotion”, with his assocations listed as Actor Machine and Noise Machine.