LudoNarraCon for 2023 is done and here are all the panels to watch again
If you missed LudoNarraCon 2023, then you missed some great chats with narrative focused game makers, from the personal Fireside Chats, to the panels that delve into the choices, representation and more.
While the demos and sale are still up for today, the panels are all up on YouTube, so you can pick one or all that you might have missed and give them watch. Most of them average around 50 minutes in length, but some do go up to an hour and change.
To make it a bit easier, we have divided them into the Fireside Chats and the panels, you can find them all below.
Fireside Chats:
Fireside Chat With Felice Tzehuei Kuan & Rachel Watts
Join Felice Tzehuei Kuan, Narrative Director at Deck Nine Games, as she sits down with Rachel Watts, Reviews Editor for PC gaming website Rock Paper Shotgun
Fireside Chat With Rebekah Valentine & Ron Gilbert
Join Rebekah Valentine, senior reporter with IGN, as she sits down with Ron Gilbert, veteran video-game designer on several LucasArts adventure games and most recently Return to Monkey Island.
Fireside Chat With Malindy Hetfeld & Scott Chen
Join Malindy Hetfeld, writer of Polygon Treehouse's upcoming Mythwrecked: Ambrosia Island, and a critic at outlets such as Edge Magazine and The Guardian, as she sits down with Scott Chen, Co-Founder of SIGONO, and designer of the OPUS series.
Panels:
Inside the Game Actor's Studio!
Developers and actors from acclaimed narrative games As Dusk Falls, Immortality and A Plague Tale: Requiem discuss their varied approaches to videogame performance.
Forming Meaningful Relationships in Games
This panel will discuss video games what it means to form relationships with the characters within them. We will explore dating sims, how they entice the player and why adding them can increase player engagement. We will discuss games that use these mechanics and how they can change a game.
Future Labors: Citizen Sleeper and Hardspace Shipbreaker in Conversation
Both Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Citizen Sleeper depict near futures where the familiar structures of capitalism and corporate control dictate the lives of their characters. In this panel Shipbreaker director Elliot Hudson and Citizen Sleeper creator Gareth Damian Martin discuss the resonances and reasoning behind their games, and what they say about work now, and in the future.
Approaching Narrative from Opposite Ends of the Word Count Spectrum
In 2022, Finji released two games: Tunic and I Was a Teenage Exocolonist. They each took very different approaches to game narrative. Tunic's in game manual is mostly written in indecipherable runes while I Was a Teenage Exocolonist has a script with over 600,000 words.
Memory, Society, Hope, and Heartbreak by Marginalized Protagonists
Marginalized characters can humanize narratives that criticize oppression, question historicity, and search for a common ground and a sense of belonging. How do concepts of hope and authenticity play into game devs’ creative processes to bring characters’ complex roles to life? Join the lead devs from 1000xRESIST, Sephonie, Solace State, and Venba as they discuss how their games’ diverse characters are designed to explore post-apocalypses, new worlds, dystopias, and modern migrations.
Once Upon a Time in a Faraway Land…
Building atmosphere in a curated single-player experience - Exploring the importance of world-building and creating tension.
Survival Storytelling
In theory, storytelling in a survival game is straightforward: do or die. The reality is, as always more complicated. How do you raise tension when the stakes are already as high as they can go? How can you offer pacing breaks without ruining the vibe overall? Are there themes besides hope and despair that might be surprisingly well-suited to exploring further in survival games?
Game Stories Told in Most Unexpected & Surprising Ways
Game Stories aren’t told just through dialog and scripted scenes – games tell stories throughout the experience, in subtle and surprising ways. In this panel, veteran writers and designers who have worked on everything from Hunt: Showdown to The Division to State of Decay to The Church in the Darkness talk about all the unexpected ways game narratives work, from environmental narrative to marketing materials to character animation to stories told in game mechanics themselves.
Using Systems-Based Writing To Make Player Choices Have a Lasting Impact on Your Narrative
Narrative systems can be a compelling way to introduce more nuance and complexity to player choice and outcomes in narrative games, all while making the task of writing these games more manageable.
When Social Is Part of the Narrative
From tabletop RPGs to MMORPGs, the notion of multiplayer narrative games is far from a recent invention. With the rise of social gaming, we’ve seen this genre making a comeback with innovative gameplay. Come and hear four game makers discuss how they incorporate social elements into their narrative games.
Beyond Representation - A Southeast Asian Approach to Narrative Games
The Southeast Asian developers behind titles such as “A Space For The Unbound”, “Kabaret”, “What Comes After” and “Afterlove EP” reflect on how they approach embedding regional culture into their narrative games by reflecting on post-colonialism, rapid economic development, and embracing nostalgia.
Creating Unexpected and Spectacular Heartthrobs in your Dating Sims
Indie game writers, directors, and producers (Romancelvania, We are OFK, ValiDate) will join to discuss their character creation process when developing fresh and intriguing characters with believable, relatable romance narratives in video games.
Those are the panels from the 2023 LudoNarraCon, if you wanted to watch the panels from past years, you can do that as well. Here is where you will find all the 2022 panels, here for the 2021 panels and finally here for the 2020 panels.
