For the past several months, we’ve been talking internally about hosting an IF conference. “We” being IFTF, current managers of IFComp, the IF Archive, etc.
Your early announcement: narrascope.org/ ! To be held June 14-16, 2019, probably at MIT (Cambridge, MA).
Our plans are not yet solid, so we’re not opening registration yet. We will be opening a call for talk proposals soon, so keep an eye out for that.
These are the talk and panels currently scheduled for NarraScope.
(Note: exact times have not yet been scheduled. This list is subject to change between now and conference time, because things can happen.)
All The World’s A Screen: How Improv and Playwriting Can Inform Digital Narrative – Aaron Zemach
Coming Soon in Inform 7 – Graham Nelson
Designing Games That Listen – David Kuelz
Dinosaurs, Podcasters, and Wake Words, Oh My!: The Narrative Design of Earplay’s Jurassic World Revealed – Heather Albano
Engineering Empathy – Dave Gilbert
Integrating and Assessing Interactive Design through Interactive Fiction using Ink – Taylor Howard, Rachel Donley
Introduction to JavaScript for IF authors – Claire Furkle
Location-based Gaming: Writing for the Real World – Austin Auclair
Making Horror: Hacking the Brain In Games – Ian Thomas
The Math Behind the Drama: Writing IF like a Pop Song – Katherine Morayati
Mathematics Through Narrative – Mike Spivey
Narrative Immersion in Escape Room Games – Laura E. Hall
Player Will Remember This – Why Dialogue Systems Make or Break Player Engagement – Julius Kuschke
Plotting: How Save the Cat Can Save Your Game – Amanda Gardner
Queer Stories in Videogames: A Performance – Dietrich “Squinky” Squinkifer
Tiny Screens, Big Stories: Narrative Design in Mobile Games – Caroline Guevara
Twine: Past, Present, Future – Chris Klimas
What Digital Storygames Can Learn From Analog Storygames – Aaron A. Reed
Worldbuilding Out of Bounds – Jess Haskins
Writing Gender in Historical Narratives – Rebecca Slitt
Writing Within the Lines: Designing IF Without Scope Creep – Cat Manning
Panels and roundtables:
Consent and Continuity: Writing Interactive Romance – Rebecca Slitt et al
Cragne Manor Postmortem – Mike Spivey and many Cragnites
Dissecting The Bandersnatch With A Vorpal Blade: What Netflix’s Choose Your Own Adventure Got Right And Got Wrong – Heather Albano, Mary Duffy, Jason Stevan Hill, Emily Short, Ian Thomas
How Telltale designed tools for Efficient Narrative Development – Zacariah Litton, Carl Muckenhoupt
Meet the IFTF Board – Jason McIntosh, Andrew Plotkin, Judith Pintar, Chris Klimas, Liza Daly
Narrative Intelligence in Interactive Storytelling – Chris Martens, Brian Magerko
Narrative on the Smartphone Screen: Writing for Interactive Story Games – Toiya Kristen Finley et al
You Are Standing in a Classroom…: Meet the IFTF Education Committee – Judith Pintar et al
Lightning talks:
Multiplayer Interactive Fiction: Technical and Authorial Challenges – Mark Baumann
Making Failure Fun: Moving Beyond Success-Based Dynamics in Narrative Design – Ian Michael Waddell
Sensory Details and Engaging the Player’s Imagination – Toiya Kristen Finley
Write Short! – Ben Schneider
And also:
Conversations
Lunches
Seeing new and in-progress work
Getting excited about that project you put aside
Helping to figure out how to run a new interactive story conference
Karsten Feyerabend of articy Software has volunteered to record some of the talks. (With the permission of the speakers, of course.) He can’t cover the entire conference, but we should be able to get a selection of the talks online. We’ll let you know the details as we work them out.