BBC WritersRoom: Writing for Games and Interactive Media
In January 2006, I gave a seminar for a bunch of up-and-coming writers about narrative in games and virtual worlds. It was pitched at an audience who knew a lot about writing for TV, radio and the theatre, but very little about games. My presentation was one of three; James Wallis talked about writing interactive narrative, and Gabriel Gilson of BBC Interactive Drama and Entertainment talked about what the BBC are doing around interactive stories - including Taggerz and Jamie Kane.
My department at the BBC have agreed to let me publish my slides and notes, but with a disclaimer that the opinions therein are mine, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the BBC.
- View my presentation - plus notes, online. Sorry about the slightly broken layout.
- Download my presentation as a Zipped Power point .ppt file (1.6Mb, released under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 England & Wales License)
- Read James Wallis' reading list. To get an idea of how well respected he is in the game community, you might want to skim read this.
Want to comment on the presentation? Leave a comment on this page. Need to get in touch with me? Try kim.plowright [at] gmail.com
Resources Elsewhere
Stuff that I find interesting gets added regularly to the interactive and games lists on my del.icio.us account: you can subscribe to those via RSS to see stuff as I find it. Bear in mind that it's a personal link dump, so sites might not always be totally relevant. (Or safe for work, for that matter...)
If you want a more general overview, have a look at all the links in del.icio.us tagged with 'Games' or with 'Interactive'
- IGDA Writers SIG - International Game Developers Association Writers Special Interest Group (with mailing list)
- IGDA ARG SIG - ditto Alternate Reality Games Special Interest group.
- Guardian Games Blog
- Gamesindustry.biz - industry news
- Gamasutra - the Art and Business of making games. Very good industry site.
- Games and Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media - "a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due January 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media."
- Book Review of Henry Jenkins' Game Design as Narrative Architecture; interesting discussions about structure and story.
- Ten myths about computer games debunked.
- Public Literature: Narratives and Narrative Structures in Lambda MOO
- Wonderland - nice games blog, written by Alice Taylor of BBC CR&D.
- Grand Text Auto - A group blog about computer narrative, games, poetry, and art.
- We Make Money not Art - interaction, art, tech... full of interesting ideas.
- Grumpy Gamer - Ron Gilbert's "often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry"
- Collision Detection - Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture.
- Only A Game - Chris Bateman on player centred game design, and sometimes squirrels. See also notes from a talk he gave at GDCE about play styles.
- Writer Response Theory