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Design
Designing a Safer Gaming Environment: How Developers Can Mitigate Real-Life Threats
Join industry veteran Sharon Fisher, Head of Trust & Safety at Keywords Studios, for an enlightening presentation about the untapped potential of community in game development. She'll share five key strategies for constructing a game through a community-centered lens. Learn why crafting your own moderation tools may not be the best strategy and discover how prioritizing community features throughout game design can increase player engagement and reduce real-life threat cases. You'll also gain in-depth insights into how robust community and meticulous moderation can elevate the gaming experience while boosting profitability.
Session Takeaway
After attending this presentation, participants will:
- Understand the importance of incorporating community health principles across all stages of game production to minimize the chances of harmful and illicit content translating into real-world dangers
- Grasp the difficulties associated with creating an in-house moderation platform
- Discover the influence of community features on enhancing player experience, brand reputation, and financial returns
Designing Surprise: Treading The Fine Line Between Delighting and Infuriating Players
Surprise is a crucial part of what it is to be entertained. It can elicit a range of human emotions, from amusement and joy to confusion and fear.
In games, surprise in storytelling is both a powerful and hazardous tool with the potential for a high positive or negative impact on the player experience. Conditions, intensity, delivery, and the players themselves are all factors that influence the outcome of the surprise and must be carefully considered to ensure the desired reaction is achieved.
As part of a Master’s Degree in Indie Game Development at Falmouth Games Academy, Morwenna carried out a research thesis into creating effective surprise and its effects on players, drawing on influences and theories across the sciences and arts, including biology, psychology, narrative, music and game design. The study tested a theoretical framework through a mixed methodology of practice-based and practice-led research and produced some thought-provoking results.
This session provides a fun and accessible overview of the research findings. It proposes a new theory to explain the study findings and a practical model for the intentional design of surprise to understand, identify and minimise the risks that high surprise events can create.
Session Takeaway
- Some of the key physiological, neurological, and behavioural impacts of surprise.
- Some of the ways the human brain interprets sensory data to create assumptions.
- How 1 and 2 may affect and be leveraged in creating engaging experiences.
- The effects of high surprise in contexts of high uncertainty.
- Identifying potential areas of risk in your game.
- Ideas for how mitigate these risks.
Empathy Through XR
How can the development of XR games open conversations around well-being, neurodiversity, and general human to human connection? The possibilities of immersion and embodiment brought about by XR games unlock whole new worlds for non-main stream games. This session explores these ideas and potential.
Sarah from Hatsumi has a body of virtual reality games that has a proven track record of positively impacting the mental health and well-being of individuals of a wide age range. Boo from Way Studio has been pioneering well-being mixed reality experiences, bridging co-production opportunities between Singapore and the UK.
Together, they will be sharing case studies of games they have made, the lessons learnt, and the processes of making these applications. They are hoping to find collaborators and partners who are also interested in exploring possible social prescribing models to further human relationships, understand human experience, and support community and connection, through making VR and MR games.
Session Takeaway
- Exposure to wellbeing-centric VR and MR games
- Impact of virtual reality and mixed reality games
- Experience design notes when creating XR games
KEYNOTE: Crafting Multiplayer Story-centric Experiences: What Makes INTERIOR/NIGHT Tick
INTERIOR/NIGHT's founder and Creative Director Caroline Marchal will discuss why the studio is passionate about interactive narrative, a genre ripe with opportunities, and where it can go: the chance to break the invisible ceiling of video games and appeal to all generations, regardless of players' skills.
She will show how the studio approaches game development for multiplayer interactive narrative experiences and how they design and write with empathy to generate empathy.
Caroline will provide an overview of the team's bespoke development process with examples from As Dusk Falls, their award-winning debut game, and will also discuss why a good story isn't enough. How you play the story and what it reveals about who you are makes it a deep and memorable experience, beyond pure entertainment.
Playing With The House Of Mouse
When being tasked with creating a new innovative game with a 100 year old icon how do you approach it? How do you pay homage to the past but push things forward, In this session I will talk about the creative challenges that came with working and designing Disney Illusion Island and working with Disney Games to create the wonderful world of Monoth.
Session Takeaway
- Working with IP
- Working with Partners
- Game Design Processes
Romance Storytelling in Games
Drawing not only from the experiences of being design feature lead for romance and companions on Baldur's Gate 3, but also a lifetime of growing up having crushes on fictional characters, I will present an analysis of how we craft interactive relationships which create real parasocial affection in players. This will be part history of romance features in video games, part analysis of why we crave this feature in the first place, and part suggestions for improving on past designs.
Session Takeaway
- This talk will establish some genre definitions and taxonomise types of romance design within gaming history.
- Simulation of romance in video games has historically led so many questioning LGBT+ individuals to have a safe environment with which to run experiments testing their sexuality.
- We are very good at showing escapist visions of relationships in video games, but we are not particularly good at showing the 'ugly'. I will analyse some of my work trying to depict arguments, drifting apart, power imbalances, and sexual trauma within video game relationships - and what those themes mean to players.
- The talk will overall try to provide insight into more realistic ways to think about relationship design - we aren't collecting 'sex' cards like in Witcher 1 any more.
The Longest Game – EVE Online’s Blueprint for Resilient Communities & Enduring Games
How do gaming developers and publishers think about their long-term strategy for success? For Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CCP Games’ CEO, the longest game is exemplified by the power of strategy, innovation, and teamwork to create lasting entertainment experiences. In this talk, Pétursson will showcase how CCP focuses on community building and nurturing a positive culture through EVE Online’s growth and evolution with its players over time. By examining these principles and tools, Pétursson will showcase how to plan for the future while maximizing the present, ultimately creating better art and entertainment for all.
Session Takeaway
- Best practice for (and importance of) collaborating with players on the development of live titles.
- How to leverage and apply the inherent nature of MMO games as friendship-building engines to improve and enhance both your product and its community.
- The ingredients and grit necessary to create, sustain and grow a longtail game universe with the potential to go on forever.
Tips and Insights on Narrative Design from Leading Writers
Award-winning writers Rhianna Pratchett, Charles Cecil (Revolution, Broken Sword), Paul Cornell (Doctor Who, Marvel) and Judi Alston (Dreaming Methods) share their experiences, insights, learnings and tips for creating high quality narrative games with Dr Jackie Mulligan (Game Republic). The panelists will explore how to make narrative games on a budget, techniques to explore character, using new technology like AI and VR to enhance storytelling in games and trends in narrative design in particular stories being interpreted across multiple media. The session will also include a Q&A.
Host: Dr Jackie Mulligan, Game Republic
Session Takeaway
- Ways to create story-based games on a budget
- Techniques to develop characters in games
- Opportunities and challenges of taking stories into different media
Under Pressure: A Football Manager Narrative Design Journey
Football Manager is a vast sandbox full of endless possibilities, potential, and pressure. Join me on a journey and some of the challenges we face as narrative designers to ensure that setbacks and failure are just as important as progress and success in our parallel worlds, and how different ways of playing the game open up fresh and exciting opportunities for storytelling.
Session Takeaway
- The role of Narrative Design in sandbox games
- The importance of losing/setbacks in the narrative arc
- Solving ongoing Design Challenges in games with no fixed ending
