IGDA Finland Seminars + January Gathering with Metropolia

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Happy New Year! January means the beginning of our spring season, starting with a gathering sponsored by Metropolia, a university of applied sciences. Media, IT and business are some of the Bachelor's Degree programmes available, with some of the studies being directly related to games. Want to know more? Don't fret, Metropolia folks will be there to tell us how they can help out the industry.

There will also be a different sort of demo corner this time: Metropolia students are going to showcase some of their games. It will be exciting to see what the new talents have cooked up!

The icing on top of this already fancy cake: we managed to piece together a seminar with some very interesting speakers at the last minute! Adam Mayes from Uppsala University will speak about narratives and how to do them right, and Mika JD Sorvari from Rival Games gives us insight on how the episodic model works for story-driven games without an established IP. These gentlemen will surely have quite the stories to tell.

Join us next week for fun and games to kickstart 2016!

IGDA Finland Seminars presents: Once Upon A Time... Narrative in Video Games
Time:
12.01.2016 at 17:30 โ€“ 18:30
Place: Maxine, Urho Kekkosen katu 1 A, 6th floor, 00100 Helsinki

- Adam Mayes (Uppsala University): Narratives. We're really doing it wrong. - Mika JD Sorvari (Rival Games): The Devil in the Detail โ€“ Developing a Story-Driven Game in the 2010's

IGDA Finland January Gathering with Metropolia
Time: 
12.01.2016 at 19:00
Place: Maxine, Urho Kekkosen katu 1 A, 6th floor, 00100 Helsinki

Please note that you need to be at least 18 years old to attend. The cloakroom service is offered free of charge.

Seminar agenda

"My name is Adam Mayes, and I am a game designer." Adam is part writer, part designer, and wholly embarrassed about speaking in the third person about himself. In a previous life he wrote short stories, comics and plays. He likes to think he has an understanding of narrative that makes him frustrating to watch movies with. How working at Uppsala University, he spends his days coaching the intentionally creative, his evenings developing stuff for money (who is he kidding, grading and planning courses), and his weekends planning the build of a residential taker in preparation for the inevitable rise of the Idiocracy.

Narratives. We're really doing it wrong. (Part of me wants to leave this section blank and tell you that it's an emergent presentation, but that would be as lazy as that style of narrative design.) In a curmudgeonly presentation Adam will go back to basics and look at how narratives are put together, before killing your puppy and telling you that you're letting our vibrant medium down. He'll then go on to talk about systematizing narratives, making better characters and, how to author truly interactive narrative experiences. All in 30 minutes.

Mika JD Sorvari is the Lead Writer at Rival Games in Turku. Having previously occupied himself as a games journalist, freelance writer and a hearse driver's assistant, he now works on finishing the first season of the neo-noir crime adventure The Detail. He believes in the potential of games to serve as a powerful medium for telling thought-provoking stories.

The Devil in the Detail โ€“ Developing a Story-Driven Game in the 2010's Episodic story-driven games are all the rage today mostly thanks to Telltale and their numerous successess. With only a few competitors, it looks like a great field for new IPs, but how is it to actually develop one in 2016, and how does the episodic model fare on the online marketplace without an established brand?