Narrascope 2020 ended last week and the videos are up on Youtube. There’s quite a lot of them but here’s my top 10 recommendations for anyone interested in IF and narrative game design.
In the order in which they were presented:
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Graham Nelson talking about the next version of Inform 7, its structure and design philosophy, and literate programming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL7HjuFyKeE (transcript: http://inform7.com/talks/2020/06/07/narrascope-ii.html)
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Stuart Moulthrop et al host a sort of Let’s Play of 80 Days while discussing its design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUHwM7y_dKQ
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Francisco Gonzales on designing adventure games that allow for failures and closing off storylines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xujaDTaDc0U
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Scott M. Bruner et al analyse the legacy of Colossal Cave Adventure from different perspectives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsjxGAbM4E0
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Em Lazer-Walker on how analytics tools are used in games industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzKLPQjwfjE
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Johnnemann Nordhagen and Laura Michet on managing 25 writers in the game Where Water Tastes Like Wine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jumzmLr-HLc
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Rebecca Harwick on writing games that get weekly story updates for several years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYIRSQkKFO8
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Sisi Jiang on how giving players more choices is not automatically always better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQC6VZiN2R4
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Aaron A. Reed talking about Kentucky Route Zero and how it ties into adventure games in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IziknN1CF0
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Doug Valenta showcasing a narrative chat system that has a complex parser for player input: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5vrW1go5Og
Other presentations were also very good so I encourage taking a look at the full playlist!