GDC Incoming!

Next week is the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. I’m going, in part because I’m part of the advisory board for the Game Narrative Summit (which runs Monday and Tuesday) and in part because I’m running narrative round tables during the main show Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and in part because my employers at Crytek are kind and generous people.

Part of the Game Narrative Summit will be the presentation of the winning entries from the student narrative competition that I judge each year. I am honored to do the judging and happy to see what each year’s crop of up-and-coming game development students think about the narratives of their favorite games.

I’ve been going off and on, mostly on, since 2000. My first talk was about believability versus realism in Ghost Recon; since then I’ve spoken on various other topics and run my roundtables, and it’s always a pleasure and an honor.

GDC is also a wonderful opportunity to catch up with friends and professional peers. I’m looking forward to seeing folks I see maybe once a year, but whose voices are loud and clear in the narrative and design communities. And if we have a few drinks to celebrate each other, that’ll be fine, too.

New Year, New Job

This week I started my new job at Crytek, working as Franchise Narrative Director for Hunt: Showdown. I am pleased to say it was a great first week. I like the team I’ll be working with and I’m looking forward to doing great things with them.

Leaving Red Storm, Joining Crytek

This pretty much says it all.

After 23 years, I will be leaving Red Storm Entertainment at the end of December and starting work at Crytek to work on their horror game HUNT: SHOWDOWN. I am incredibly excited about this new opportunity, and I am looking forward to joining the team that has already done so much great work creating the world of HUNT.

I am nothing but grateful to Red Storm and Ubisoft for the opportunities to learn and grow they have afforded me over the years, but this was an opportunity I could not in good conscience refuse. It’s literally everything I’ve wanted to do in a game for years.

I’ll be staying in North Carolina and working remotely, and I look forward to sharing more with you as things progress.

 

Nevermore RPG Stretch Goal

My old White Wolf running mate Ian Lemke is Kickstarting a tabletop RPG of American Gothic Horror called Nevermore. You can find the details here. And among those details is a stretch goal whereby yours truly will be writing some short fiction for the game. So if you’re a role-player and love horror, check it out!