GDC 2011 Transcript: Motivating Players in Open World Games

Since I don't use speaker notes, my slides from GDC 2011 are basically useless on their own.  Because of this, I wanted to post this transcript of my talk online.  I typed the majority of this out on the plane to San Francisco, mostly as a way to practice the talk quietly, so it follows what I had planned to say pretty closely.  In fact, I realized through the week that I had forgotten to make several minor points which are captured here.

Fair warning - this is long.  Turns out I speak about 7,000 words per hour.  Transcript after the jump.

GDC Slides: Motivating Players in Open Games

GDC has been an amazing time so far, and the main conference hasn't even started yet. I've hardly had time to sleep so far, but I did want to get my slides posted online for anybody who wanted them.

Here they are on slideshare: "I Want To Go To There: Motivating Players in Open Games"

I should caveat, however, that my slides aren't going to be very useful except as a reminder for folks who were at the talk and are looking for a rough refresher.  I was able to avoid using too much text on my slides and don't really use speaker notes, so for most it will just be a bunch of loosely connected images. Audio will be released on the GDC Vault, though, and I did write out a rough transcript of the talk on the plane ride into San Francisco Sunday, so I may clean that text up (it's around 6,000 words and I didn't get through the whole talk!) and post it here for more general use.

I also had a cutting-room floor talk about non-linear level design that I hastily composed from a portion of the talk that we didnt' have time for.  I'm still deciding what to do with that, though.  It's obviously much less polished than what I presented on Monday.

Thanks again to everybody who attended, all who asked questions and anybody who #LDinaDay hash tag to sound off during the day. It was a ton of fun for us, and I hope you enjoyed it too!

GDC 2011 & Skyrim Announced!

Time flies! GDC 2011 is only weeks away.  We're gearing up for the Level Design in a Day Tutorial, which will take a similar format to last year, where each presenter will cover a topic in detail, as well a handful of Q&A type sessions throughout the day. I'll be talking about the unique level design problems presented by Open World games, and how we try to tackle them at Bethesda Games Studio. Got any questions you'd like answered on the topic? Drop me a line or leave a comment!

Speaking of work: I couldn't be more excited that we've finally announced The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  We've been plugging away at this game for some time, and it's a pleasure to at last begin sharing it with the world.  The Game Informer site will be doling out details all month long, including this video feature where Todd takes you on a tour of the new office space we moved into early last year, as well as showing a bit of our company kitchen and Muay Thai sessions in the new gym. What can I say? I work at a great place.

Here's to an exciting 2011 - year of the dragon!

The Myth of the LDD

QuakeCon was awesome.  We, among other things, got an amazing demo of Rage, walked around a BYOC that would make anybody believe in PC gaming, and heard the news that Arkane joined up with Zenimax.  Which, believe me, is worth being excited about.

I think the World of Design panel went well, but I had a feeling that one remark in particular might raise some eyebrows.  Sure enough, the next morning I had an email waiting for me from an astute SMU student, asking me to explain my thoughts on documentation for level design.

I'm one chatty Kathy...

Seems like I can't stop running my mouth in 2010.  I sat down with community manager Nick Breckon (of former Idle Thumbs glory) recently and chatted about the excellent Inception.  Snippets of this conversation made it onto the Bethblog as part of a series Nick is running. He was kind enough to edit the significant portions of inane rambling and keep things pretty relevant to game design.  Just the facts, m'am.

I'm also hopping a flight to Dallas for QuakeCon!  I'm on the "World of Design" panel with Matt Hooper from id, Neil Alphonso of Splash Damage, and Todd Alderman from Respawn.  I'm pretty excited and honored to be going.  It's my first QuakeCon, and these are some pretty great guys to share the table with.

GDC Slides: Level Designer, Storyteller

I was hesitant to release my slides as-is, but I decided to go ahead and make them available. I'm not sure how much use they are by themselves, but they should at least be handy as a refresher for folks who were able to attend. Speaking of those who were able to attend, here's where every one of them was awesome and went along with my prodding to do the wave before the talk began: