I’m running a 2-hour writing for games workshop with Express Media on May 22nd from 2-4.  Details here.  I’m going to cover the key similarities and differences between games & more traditional media and how to approach the process of games writing.

I’ll also be on the panel ‘Never Surrender’ on May 29th at 1:45.

Never surrender
Writing isn’t all about success stories! Join our writers as they speak candidly about rejection, creative risk-taking and projects that took ten years from creation to publication. Why do they stick with it, and is it all worth it in the end?
With — Paul Callaghan, Elizabeth Campbell, Sean Condon and Dee White. Hosted by Simonne Michelle-Wells.

And 20 minutes before the program launch, I was interviewed for the Arts Alive program about my experiences with the festival and why I think it’s a Good Thing(tm).  (Summary: Writers > Readers for inspiration!)

Thanks to Lisa Dempster, I was at last month’s Format Festival in Adelaide talking about writing & technology on the Non-Paper Publishing panel.  One of the other speakers, Estelle Tang, recently interviewed me about games writing for the Kill Your Darlings podcast.  You can listen to it here.

And lastly, I reviewed The Pleasures of Computer Gaming for RMIT‘s Second Nature Journal.  You can read that review here.

Details from the Express Media site are:

Express Media in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival presents:

How To Write Computer Games with Paul Callaghan, 2-4pm. The Wheeler Centre, 176 Little Lonsdale Street, Melbourne.

$10

Games, like all mediums, have their own strengths and weaknesses as a storytelling medium. This workshop takes a look at what makes games tick, what you can learn from traditional forms, and what you should know about the expressive power of mechanics.

link

I’ll be at the Format Festival – Academy of Words in Adelaide on March 13th. Definitely talking about non-paper publishing, but might also be chairing something else. Details here.

I’m also taking part in the next Meanland event – Reading in a Time of Technology – on May 19th at the Wheeler Centre.  Details here.

And, lastly,  I’ll once again be talking at the Emerging Writers’ Festival, sometime from May 21st to May 30th.

World Congress of Science and Factual Producers

On Friday December 4th, I took part in a speed-networking event at the World Congress of Science and Factual Producers.  What was interesting about this was being able to step away from the traditional pc/console space and think about new opportunities to use games and games technology.

In talking to the directors and producers, I had the thought that perhaps games were closer to documentary features than to narrative features.  The topics explored – happiness as a contagion that can be tracked using network theory, or a man who built his own 300-million search-and rescue empire – were built on the film-maker exploring the world, creating theories, and constructing the narrative as they go, which is a clear analogue for what players do in games.

Not to say that there isn’t room for narrative in games, but modelling gameplay & the reveal of narrative in more of a documentary style might prove to be a useful template.

Game Connect Asia Pacific

Or GCAP as it’s less mouthfully known, took place at Crown from December 6th – 8th.  I gave two presentations – one on games and games literacy (which was attended by only 5 people due to a last minute room change) and one on the creative process of writing and how that applies to games.  Due to meetings and general schmoozing (and also pulling together my writing presentation), I saw almost none of the conference itself (other than Tim Stellmach’s keynote & the indie games that I was judging), but came away with the overall impression that from an art & design perspective, the content was unfocused and weak – which is reflected in a single stream that contained all of the art, design, and audio talks.  As design is one of our local industry’s challenges, it would be nice to see an increased focus on it next year.

Details on the presentations after the fold.

Games and Games Literacy

This is a slightly modified version of a talk I gave at the VITTA conference last year on models of interacting with games in terms of their components as well as traditional literacy and numeracy skills.

“Today’s students have never seen a world without video games.  They’re an integral part of life now, becoming a new cultural artifact, a new entertainment medium, and bringing with them a whole slew of new employment opportunities.

But how do they work?  And what are the parameters for having a meaningful dialog about them with our students?

In this session, Paul Callaghan, a veteran game developer, will explore the elements that contribute to games literacy and how that can be applied to traditional literacy and numeracy skills.”

Presentation – GCAP – Games and Games Literacy

What does a writer do anyway?

Standing room only for this session, which was incredibly flattering.  Also set a new record for me – 60 slides in just under 50 minutes!

“Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.”

My session, What Does a Writer Do Anyway?, is on Tuesday December 8th at 3:35 as part of the Art / Design / Audio stream.

What does a writer do anyway?

Telling stories is an essential part of our cultural fabric, but in the face of a new medium, one in which mechanics, rules, and play are at the heart of the audience experience, we’re still learning how to work the thousands of years of accumulated knowledge in writing and storytelling to our best advantage.

An often-neglected discipline in video games, this session will look at the skills and craft that writers use when approaching storytelling, dialogue, structure, and characterisation, and how to apply those to video games without losing the particular strengths of the medium.  By dissecting the craft of writing, it will demonstrate the thought processes behind story creation, what does and doesn’t work within the medium of games, and why some of those boundaries exist.  It will also show how some of those core concepts are applicable to games without stories, informing mechanic, level, and systems design.

Looking to the future, the session will lastly speculate on the marriage of traditional narrative and mechanics, and the sorts of stories that can only be told in the medium of games by exploiting the fundamental gameplay forces of agency, choice, rules, and goals.

• We officially announced our dates & venue for Freeplay.  August 14 & 15 at the State Library of Victoria.  It’s very exciting to finally have that out there – now just to sort out the programming & speakers & everything else.
• My 2nd Arts Hub column is up here.  Subscribers only

After lunch, I saw The Art vs Craft panel.  It was interesting structurally – having the panellists debate both sides of the argument against themselves – and the speakers were entertaining – Nathan Curnow wore a bunny suit to speak – but I came away with the same opinion I had going in: both Art & Craft are equally important.

Next up, was me speaking on the panel I Can Say Yes But In The End It Will Be No, talking about issues of collaboration and ownership as a writer with Liz Argall, Angela Bentzien, and Luke Devenish. Both Liz & Luke focused on the positives of the collaborative experience – an opinion that I share.  When it works, it’s brilliant, because other creative people take what’s in your head and make it better than you could have imagined it.  when it goes wrong, as I’ve seen it do, it can be incredibly frustrating though, but I think we all thought that the working with other artists had made us better writers.  Angela spoke about the practical nature of the work and of having ownership of it – especially as a theatre group, and having to come to a creative consensus.

I spoke about the role of collaboration between the author and the audience, and how that relates to ownership.  My theory is that you never really own the work, and that there’s always some form of collaboration, because writing – or storytelling – is about communication, and in order for communication to happen, you need at least 2 people.  In established media – prose, games, theatre, comics – the communication you have with your audience is one way -  it’s a creator / consumer relationship – but with games, you get the chance to turn that communication into more of a conversation.  Games are built in such a way that the audience actually has to engage with the telling of the story, they have to take action, they have to own their own agency, and they have to push through the game’s story.  Done well, narrative games have access to the audience’s emotions in a far more visceral form than the empathic response of prose or film because you aren’t watching someone on a screen do something, or reading about them doing it in a book, the audience is actively making a choice and then acting on that choice before seeing the consequences play out.  That’s something that’s really exciting and powerful to me as a writer, and hopefully I got that across in my allotted ten minutes – at least when I wasn’t suggesting members of the audience were stalking me, telling stories about mental illness, or talking about a girl who got away.

It was a lively panel, I thought.  From where I was sitting, everyone shared something of themselves, and I felt like I knew everyone a little bit better afterwards, which is exactly what I’m looking for when I hear people speak.

Next up, I went straight into my From Here to There session to talk about my experience writing games generally, and more specifically Doctor Who.  I think, a few years after the project ended, that this was a nice way to finally put the whole thing to bed.  I got to talk about how I got my start as a games writer, the greatest creative experience of my professional life (so far), the worst creative experience of my professional life (hopefully ever), and to talk in a bit more detail about the strengths and weaknesses of games as a storytelling medium.  It was tremendous fun, but also a little strange, because at times it felt like I was just having a conversation, but then I’d turn around and there would be 20 people in the same room, all listening to me, and all laughing in the right spots.

The last session was Letters to the Editor, a chance for David Ryding, the festival director, to bring back speakers and ask them questions from the audience.  It was a good way to finish up the festival – funny, insightful, and focused on the process of writing.

And that’s the strength of the emerging writers’ festival – it’s about writing, not writers.  I felt energised and inspired about my own work after hearing people speak.  I was reminded that there are as many ways of working as their are writers and that you need to find not only your own voice, but your own reasons for doing the work, and your own path through that.  I got to speak to some incredibly talented and interested people, who in turn, seemed to see me the same way – which left me with an insufferable ego for the following few days – and who also shared my drive to write and share and communicate and make it work in whatever way we need to.  That for me is the crux of the festival – bringing writers together and building a community, no matter what stage of your career you’re at.

Which brings me to a question I’ve been thinking about since I was asked to take part – am I an emerging writer?  Well, yes and no, I think.  I’m still learning.  I’m still finding my feet.  I’m still bluffing my way through some of it.  But, I know I can do it – at least for games.  So, in that area, I don’t know that I am emerging, but I don’t know that I’m established quite yet either.  Maybe we need another definition – something between emerging and emerged – but I suspect we’d then need two more definitions to bridge those, then 4 more to bridge those, then 8, then it would never stop and our dictionary would contain nothing but words to describe the stages of a writer’s career.

Maybe then, it’s enough to just say, I’m a writer, and I’m doing this work, and that’s where I’m at.  I think that’s what I’ll do.  At least until somebody stops me, takes my hand, shakes their head, and says, ‘sorry son, ‘fraid you’re not a writer.’

And I’ll look them in the eye, and there’ll be a moment between us that stretches out just a little bit too long but neither of us will say anything, and when they’re just about to pull away, their fingers losing their grip, their cold hand retreating, I’ll smile, and then I’ll kick them in the shins and run off down the street!

On Saturday, I wasn’t speaking so I was able to attend panels, get a sense of the space for Sunday, and hear cool people talk about interesting things.

First up was Seven Enviable Lines where the festival’s six ambassadors – Luke Devenish, Kathryn Heyman, Rachel Hills, David Milroy and Pooja Mittal – spoke about the seven pieces of advice they wished they’d been given starting out.  As a fiction writer, I found Luke Devenish and Kathryn Heyman most interesting.  Luke is a playwright & teacher who’s worked on both Neighbours and Home and Away.  He had a really strong sense of the craft of writing and was an incredibly open and personal speaker, both things that I look for and try to do when I’m presenting too.  Kathryn Heyman is a novellist, and again, had a strong sense of craft and willingness to share.  I knew I’d get to catch up with Luke at some point because I was on a panel with him, but I resolved to talk to Kathryn at some point, but sadly only got to shake her hand as she was leaving the bar on Sunday Evening.  She told me I had very soft hands.  I told her I was a writer and had never done a day of hard labour in my life.

I saw two From Here to There sessions – Hollow Fields with Madeleine Rosca, and The Librarians with Robyn Butler and Wayne Hope.  These sessions were designed to give the audience more of an in depth look at a particular piece of work.  There’s something consistently comforting in hearing the stories of how people create.  There are always enough trials – the length of time it took to get the Librarians off the ground; Madeleine having entire pages of her comic rejected and having to rework them – that it reminded me that this is part and parcel of the writer’s life.

The Great State Divide was an attempt to answer the question – is there a regional voice for each state in Australia.  As an outsider, I find the question of an ‘Australian Voice’ an incredibly interesting one, but I’m not sure this session managed to answer the question.  The speakers were diverse in both content and quality – the highlight being Sean Riley who told the incredibly personal story of him growing up in Tasmania and the very clear moment where he realised he wanted to be a writer.

Last on Saturday, before retreating to Fad Gallery in Chinatown, was The Pitch where a broad range of publishers – some established, some independent – let the audience in on what they were looking for.

The day let me put into words something that I’ve thought for a long time but never actually verbalised.  Seeing such a large group of writers, with such broad ranges of experience, I still found myself drawn to particular things – and it wasn’t necessarily what they said, but how they said it.  I’m interested in people who share something of themselves at conferences, who, afterwards, you feel like you know a little bit better.  If they manage to impart something useful, some glimmer of knowledge about how to proceed, great, but I’d much rather hear someone talk who could speak with conviction and passion about why they write, letting their personality shine through.

Sunday writeup coming soon…

And a gentle reminder that I’ll be speaking this coming Sunday as part of the EWF’s Town Hall program.

Check out the announcement and our website.