GWSIG GDC 2005
International Game Developers Association
|| Game Writers SIG || Current Initiatives || Improving Conference Offerings
Q: Considering the side panel event, what is the progress on this?
Q: Will the GWSIG be submitting a tutorial again, or perhaps a panel discussion?
The question was posed on the mailing list - what were the writing-centric offerings at GDC like?
Ben Serviss: I went to Bob Bates' hour-long session on the Hero's Journey and how it applies to game design, and Clint Hocking's Narrative in Splinter Cell session. The first one was basically a quick primer some of the hero's journey tenets, and the Splinter Cell session mostly covered narrative in terms of gameplay (emergent, embedded, procedural, etc), only touching on writing. To my knowledge there wasn't a catchall writing for games session in any facet on the level of John McLean-Foreman's tutorial from 04, which seemed to cover all of the bases.
Otherwise, there was at least Earnest Adams' session on game writing that I missed, so I can't comment on an overall lack of concentration in one area. I would have liked to see more material dealing with the realistic obstacles in game writing, like different methods of laying out dialog trees, handling divergent plot points, and any other game-specific issues of storytelling.
Ed: I attended just about every lecture I could on story and narrative. Went to one panel discussion called "Why Isn’t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories?" that had some big names (Tim Schafer, Warren Spector) that I think Richard will agree was pretty boring. I'm in the process of writing up my trip report for High Voltage.
I went to the Adams talk, it was more of a look back at 10 years of "interactive gaming". Rehashing the boasts made by people determined to make engaging, interactive stories and then went on to make "Nightrap". Didn't talk much about writing specifically
Stephen Jacobs From my casual observation of writing issues at GDC over the past few years the first set of comments above seems to cover the general point of view, ie
"Give 'em the writers journey, a few terms and Lee sheldon or someone doing the big picture and we're done. Really writing's mostly design anyway."
No disrespect to Lee, or anyone else who has filled that role. What Lee does is great, but we can't seem to get beyond that. Most other topics, especially technical ones, seem to be able to cover "wide and shallow" beginner stuff down to "narrow and deep" developer stuff. Writing seems to get pigeonholed into wide and shallow Things like Dialog Trees, Engines, Dialog Writing, the comedy workshop example above, finding the right writers for your project, etc. Those are all good things and there are more.
