GDC 2008:: Slides for "Do, don't show"

Somewhere around 11pm last night I discovered that Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder has been systematically posting the highlights of the TED Conference. I swore to not look at any of this cool stuff until I'd finished annotating my slides. Not because I'm particularly diligent, but because I knew that watching even one of these visual communciation masterpieces would be utterly demoralizing...

As promised - and naturally, somewhat belatedly - I've uploaded the monster slide deck for my talk at this year's GDC, entitled "Do, don't show: Narrative design in FarCry 2".

In case you're wondering where the actual spoken part is; I've embedded directly into the notes pane of the Powerpoint doc. If that ends up being a pain in the ass, someone let me know and I'll paste the chewy center into a separate Word file. It's a whopping 6+ MB, and that's after I went through all the image compression/cropping wackiness. I'm sorry. Actually, no I'm not. If you can wait patiently through 350 MB of BitTorrent action to pirate the latest episode of Dexter, you can spare me a measily 6MB of your time... Damn you, Dexter.

Comments

[Oscar]

thanks for sharing this valuable contribution

[Rob]

I stumbled across these slides over on Clint's blog and found them to be a fantastic insight into the narrative construction of games. I just want to thank you for making them available - they enabled a layman to grasp the scope of what you are trying to accomplish.

[roBurky]

Whoa. That's a fantastic document to read. Many thanks for adding on the speaking notes to the slides. It's a great insight into the kind of thought that goes into this element of things. The graphs of systemic and choreographed narrative in particular were very thought-provoking.

Before reading this, I had just finished writing my own criticism of one element of Far Cry 2's narrative as a response to Clint Hocking's comments on Pentadact's blog. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on it.
Uploaded to here:
http://www.roburky.co.uk/?p=10

I hadn't read this presentation when writing that, but I think it supports some of the assumptions I made, so I've popped in a link to it.