CONFERENCE
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GAME DESIGN
Creating compelling, immersive games requires understanding, visualizing, demonstrating, and tuning the interactions of an ever-increasing number of game tools and systems. While game designers need to understand and exploit the possibilities of new technologies such as realistic physics, facial expressions, and lighting techniques; they must also continue to master the traditional disciplines of drama, game play, and psychology.
The Game Design Track explores the challenges and ramifications of the interaction between new technologies and established techniques.
HIGHLIGHTED SESSIONS
Ambiguity and Abstraction in Game Writing: Lessons from Dear Esther
Dan Pinchbeck (thechineseroom)
As a cost-effective means of diversifying the emotional range of a game, supporting interpretation and understanding, and widening the feel of the presented world beyond visible assets, story is a vital tool in every game designer's kit.
Despite a lack of interaction and traditional gameplay, Dear Esther still succeeds in creating a powerful, engaging game. This session focuses on Dear Esther's unusual story and examines how very different narrative experiences can be created. It focuses on both the storytelling devices the game utilizes, and the story itself—how it handles plot, emotion, character, symbolism and ambiguity to help the player construct a complex and largely self-generated story experience.
Pinchbeck will introduce specific examples from the game and explain how ambiguity and abstraction were used as specific design techniques in the game's story, to counterpoint the experience design being leveraged in the environment, audio and soundtrack. This session will also explore the relationship between emotion, story and player experience and offer thechineseroom's understandings of why Dear Esther's story hit home with so many players despite its uncompromisingly problematic content and delivery.
Despite a lack of interaction and traditional gameplay, Dear Esther still succeeds in creating a powerful, engaging game. This session focuses on Dear Esther's unusual story and examines how very different narrative experiences can be created. It focuses on both the storytelling devices the game utilizes, and the story itself—how it handles plot, emotion, character, symbolism and ambiguity to help the player construct a complex and largely self-generated story experience.
Pinchbeck will introduce specific examples from the game and explain how ambiguity and abstraction were used as specific design techniques in the game's story, to counterpoint the experience design being leveraged in the environment, audio and soundtrack. This session will also explore the relationship between emotion, story and player experience and offer thechineseroom's understandings of why Dear Esther's story hit home with so many players despite its uncompromisingly problematic content and delivery.
The Self, Presence, and Storytelling
Thomas Grip (Frictional Games)
A videogame typically presents the player with a system to figure out and conquer, building everything else on top of that. In this talk, Grip will present and discuss an alternative design approach. Instead of having traditional game mechanics, the focus should lie on creating a sense of presence and on letting the imagination do most of the work. This lecture will go over basic scientific and philosophical ideas for this approach, and then go into the concrete design decisions needed to achieve it.
The main goal of this talk is to present an alternative view on how to approach video game design. The outlined philosophy is meant to act as a springboard to construct experiences that deal with deeper themes; something seen in other media but mostly missing from video-games.
The main goal of this talk is to present an alternative view on how to approach video game design. The outlined philosophy is meant to act as a springboard to construct experiences that deal with deeper themes; something seen in other media but mostly missing from video-games.
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