Presenting at Narrascope!

There’s a new games conference this summer called Narrascope, taking place in Boston, June 14-16. Narrascope was established to support interactive narrative, adventure games, and interactive fiction by bringing together writers, developers, and players. Until now, there wasn’t really any conference in the United States dedicated to that particular niche of games and writing, so I was really happy to see the announcement of its creation.

I’ve been to plenty of industry conferences in my old life of working in theatre, but I’ve never attended a professional gathering in my current life of working at Traipse where I build puzzles, scavenger hunts, walking tours, and other unusual experiences. Writing and developing narrative-driven walking tours has become something of a specialty of mine and in general, location based gaming is a subject I’ve long focused on in this blog and various other media appearances I’ve made. In a fit of rare self confidence I submitted a presentation proposal to Narrascope and it was accepted!

I will be giving a presentation titled, Location-based gaming: writing for the real world where I’ll talk about going from an enthusiast of location-based gaming to a developer/writer of such experiences, a few lessons I’ve learned along the way about what works, what doesn’t, and what I’m still figuring out when writing stories for people on the move. I’ll talk about where to start when writing a story for a location-based experience and what to consider when developing the structure of your narrative. I will also provide plenty of examples of location-based narrative work, and will break those examples down into broad categories to help communicate different possible styles. Further, I will provide examples of tools that could be used to create your own location-based narrative/game.

The conference already has a line-up of heavy-hitters in the industry so please send me good vibes as I fight off the occasional wave of impostor syndrome-induced panic. If you’re going, please say hello!