I Waited a Year for This

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Last year, I gave my second presentation at Narrascope, a conference for narrative designers and folks who love thinking about interactive narratives. My first Narrascope talk was about Adventure Snack in 2022, but the show was virtual that year due to a particularly novel form of coronavirus. It was like giving a presentation on Zoom. Not thrilling, though I did like the Super Nintendo style conference interface where you walked around a digital convention hall.

However, last year’s presentation was at The Strong Museum in Rochester, NY. It’s a remarkable place if you love toys and games. They have incredible interactive exhibits dedicated to the history of video games, the Video Game Hall of Fame, and a comically large pinball game, not to mention a miniature golf course and the creepy talking doll that Thomas Edison made. I got to present in their auditorium to a full house. Very thrilling!

My 30 minute talk is called “First Person Talkers: Simulating Conversation.” It’s about a hidden genre of games. Many are familiar with FPS games or “first person shooters,” where the primary mechanic is shooting NPCs. Think Doom, Halo, Call of Duty, etc. In a “first person talker,” as I called it, the player chats with NPCs. The primary mechanic is having conversations with characters in-game from a first person perspective to advance the story, solve a puzzle, or explore the world. This quasi-genre spans visual novels, dating sims, FMV games, walking simulators, and more. I explore the tropes of first person talkers and the techniques FPT designers use to foster a stronger connection between players and NPCs.

I’m proud of this talk. I put a lot of time and thought into it (right up until the day I presented, lol). I was expecting to share it with you sometime last year, but the 2024 Narrascope talks never went up. I waited for months and months, but their YouTube account was relatively quiet all year. Eventually, I gave up and forgot about it.

A week ago, I was talking with Josh Gram about Narrascope. Josh designed the UI for my game Fix Your Mother’s Printer, which I discuss at length in the talk. I said off-handedly that it was too bad the 2024 Narrascope talks never got on YouTube and he told me they just did. Whaaaaa?! 🤯

First Person Talkers

If you love story in games, or you’re a developer yourself, I think you’ll find my talk interesting and hopefully educational. Plus, I opened by discussing a classic VHS board game, because it was the Museum of Play and my idea of play is subjecting a room full of nerds to trash talk from beyond the grave!

🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever played a First Person Talker? Do you enjoy narratively driven games? I always appreciate a recommendation for a game with a really good story. You can reply to this email directly, or tell the whole world by clicking the orange button below.

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Geoffrey Golden is a narrative designer, game creator, and interactive fiction author from Los Angeles. He’s written for Ubisoft, Disney, Gearbox, and indie studios around the world.

4 responses to “I Waited a Year for This”

  1. Brian McGuinness

    I truly love a good story in video games. That’s why I’m all about Indies lately and sometimes they don’t even have dialogue but they still can tell a good story. Like, I think Last of Us 2 is a masterpiece. I love the new God of War series and I just finished Expedition 33 which instantly went on my “top five all time games ever” list. The story is incredible. The acting is incredible. So I don’t really play visual novels or things like that. But if it’s a good story, I’m on board.

    Reply
    1. Geoffrey Golden

      I hear a lot of great things about all those games, especially Expedition 33 recently. Any game in any genre can have a great story. They’re not exclusive to story-forward genres like visual novels.

      Reply
  2. Sightless Scholar

    Added your talk to my YouTube queue(though, being in the 30-40 minute range, I’ll probably get to it tonight at the latest unless like a dozen of the YouTube channels I’ve bookmarked have new sub-30 minute videos waiting for me when I do my nightly open all in tabs on all the category folders under the YouTube folder in my Firefox bookmarks(I tend to prioritize shorter videos, bookmarking anything longer than 20 minutes and downloading anything longer than 40 minutes for offline listening).

    As for first person talkers, the first thing that comes to mind is Galatea, a single room interactive fiction where the player chats with an animate statue, though I’ve only gotten a handful of the game’s many endings… and maybe it’s kind of cheating since it’s kind of famous(at least in the IF space, probably unknown to the mainstream) for being a game built around pushing the limits of NPC dialog within traditional parser IF.

    Reply
    1. Geoffrey Golden

      Thanks for adding my talk to your queue! I have a lot of active YouTube watch lists in different categories, so I totally get it.

      Good choice! Galatea was very close to making it into my talk. I don’t remember why it didn’t, honestly.

      Reply

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