Austin GDC talk

After becoming irritated about putting in a lot of work to prepare talks for conferences, and then for all that work to promptly vanish into the ether once my hour is up, I resolved to do something about it. I’ve bought a reasonably good microphone and have started recording the talks that I give to different people; I am also going to start posting edited transcripts.

The first talk is ‘We Tell Stories: A New Form of Storytelling’, which I gave on September 17th 2008 at the Austin Game Developers conference.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1887664&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Unfortunately the slides didn’t quite work in this recording, but I hope to start using screencast software for recording talks in future, which will be far more interesting and useful – particularly for one like this. In fact I may end up re-recording this one. There are also things I would do with the gain and such.

This talk starts out well, and then begins to ramble a bit towards the end when I realise I’ve lost one page of my notes. The ending is also slightly uneven, although arguably the most controversial, since telling a room full of game writers that I think most of their stories are mediocre, was enough to make me think I was going to get lynched. Fortunately that didn’t happen, and while some people were unhappy, a majority of people agreed with my basic argument – that we have to do better.