Collaborate to Innovate: A Networking Opportunity for Producers to Meet Digital Media and Gaming Experts – Friday 4th Dec

Taking linear broadcast projects to online and gaming platforms can present new possibilities in creativity, finance and audience reach. The key to a successful transition lies in the collaboration of teams with multi-disciplinary expertise. This session gives the opportunity to a limited number of experienced filmmakers interested in convergence to meet one-on-one with Australia’s leading digital media and gaming experts. The morning will provide an overview of techniques and possibilities followed by 15-minute one-on-one sessions for targeted advice and potential collaboration with any or all of the digital specialists.

Game Connect Asia Pacific 2009

Games Literacy – Sunday 6th December

Presentation – .mov

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.

What does a writer do anyway? – 3:35, Tuesday 8th December

Presentation – Google Presentation

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.

IGDA Melbourne

Trends for local indies – 10/11/09

Presentation – Google Presentation

An overview of local industry trends since 2000 and options for independent development.  More detail on the numbers can be found in the blog posts The State of Things and Collated data.

iDef 2009

Do you have a game plan? – 30/10/09

Presentation – .mov

The state of the industry worldwide by Tony Reed from Reed Interactive followed by an overview of the roles and career paths in development.

Take me by the hand – 31/10/09

Presentation – .mov

Join game developers Craig Duturbure and Paul Callaghan as they walk you through their favourite games and reveal the highlights and hiccups of game development.

Academy of Interactive Entertainment

Guest Lecture: Independent Development – 14/10/09

Presentation – .mov

The shape of the local industry and opportunities for indie developers, including what to focus on, experimental gameplay models, and options for funding and distribution.

Screen Australia

Innovation Session – 1/10/09

Presentation – .mov

An overview of games as an industry and medium, their relationship to film, and their relative strengths and weaknesses.

RMIT Games Program

Mechanics and Narrative – 8/09/09

Presentation – .mov

Lecture on symbolism and grammar and how that can be applied to traditional media and games.

SYN Media Learning Week 2009

Gaming and Learning: Panel Discussion and Play – 28/8/09

Games Industry and IT experts will help you learn and experience the educational potential of video games and gaming culture. Starting with a panel discussion on how games help students learn useful skills and ending with a chance to get your hands on some gaming consoles and play!

With Vincent Trundle and Michael Woods

Freeplay 2009

Where to from here? – 15/8/09

At the first Freeplay in 2004, there was no steam, no App store, no XNA, no Xbox Live Arcade, no PSN, and no WiiWare.

This panel looks at where we might be in another 5 years.

VITTA ICT Career Expo 2009

How I got a job playing games for a living – 1/8/09

Presentation – .mov

An updated version of my talk from 2008

Video games don’t just appear from nowhere.  Somewhere, right now, there are people writing code, making art, designing levels and putting the finishing touches on games that will eventually find their way into PCs and consoles all over the world.  In Australia, there are around 2500 people doing just that and this number is expected to grow dramatically over the next 5 years.  In this presentation, Paul Callaghan, who has worked as a programmer, a game designer, and now a games teacher, will talk about how he found his way into the industry, how things have changed since then, how it’s possible to earn a living from it, and how it’s not all just sitting around playing games all day.

Emerging Writers’ Festival 2009

I can say yes now but in the end it will be no – 31/5/09

You spend hours deliberating over your punctuation, only to have actors, artists, directors and all and sundry throw out semi colons with barely a thought! This panel looks at maintaining ownership over your own words.

With Liz Argall, Angela Bentzien, Paul Callaghan and Luke Devenish

Hosted by Andrew Horabain

Doctor Who – Computer Game Storylining  – 31/5/09

In late 2005 Paul Callaghan found himself unsuccessfully pitching to the BBC for the new Doctor Who computer game. Eventually, he worked with them on developing the game – and what followed was a writer’s dream in aligning with the revamped TV show, and a nightmare of restrictions due to the differing viewpoints of the BBC.

In conversation with Daniel Ducrou

CAE Melbourne

Industry Overview – 13/5/09

As part of the PWE Industry Overview subject, an outline of what writing for games involves and how I found myself doing it.

National Screenwriters Conference 2009

Writing – It’s More Than A Game – 26/2/09

Presentation – .mov

Games On Net Article

Presentation Footage

Panel Discussion Footage

The differentiation between games and films is blurring rapidly. As game graphics and other technical innovations reach a highpoint, games are depending more and more on character, story and plot… and traditional screenwriters are becoming a valuable resource for the games industry.

The major global film market (15-30yo) is spending more time and money on games than cinema – and the trend isn’t slowing. So is there a place for you in game writing? Do you have to be a user to appreciate the form? How do your skills translate to this exciting field? And is the sky really the limit? Find out how you can tap into this exciting writing opportunity from three internationally respected games writers.

VITTA 2008

From designer to teacher and back again – 24/11/08

Presentation – .mov

Today’s students have never seen a world without video games.  According to ABS statistics: 12.5m games were sold in 2006; 6.1m video game consoles have been sold since 2000; 3.6m Australian households have a video game console; and 4.8million Australian households have an internet enabled PC which is capable of playing games.

In this session, Paul Callaghan, a veteran game developer now teaching programming & game design in the VET sector, will discuss his experiences transitioning from industry to teaching and how playing games and learning are inextricably linked.

Critical thinking about video games – 26/11/08

Presentation – .mov

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 now teaching programming & game design in the VET sector, will discuss the theory of how video games work and how that knowledge can be used in the classroom.

GC:AP 2008

Towards a theory of Everything: Lessons learned as a programmer, designer, writer, and teacher – 20/11/08

Presentation – .mov

One of our first instincts is to play. As children, we use it to explore our environment, to test roles, to establish our position in the world. We test the rules imposed by our psychology, our biology, our social structure. We form our own individual goals as we go, trying to build a model of how the world works, trying to work out who we are and why we’re here. We skip and stumble and run and tell stories as we move further and further away from our comfort zone towards the extreme limits of our abilities, where we fall, hopefully not too far, then pull out our pencils and scribble down that we found the edge of the map.

Video games tap deeply into our need for play, but now the goals are constructed, the rules are more rigid, and how we interact with the world has been carefully designed as an experience. But that experience is still an act of exploration. The player is wandering through a game space finding the edges, charting the terrain, failing and trying again.

The process of creation is the same. We begin with a vague sense of where we are, and where we want to go, and then we write experimental programs and sketch thick lines in photoshop and build prototypes from paper. We tentatively map the programming and art and design space, finding new things, stumbling, falling, mapping the edges, still following that same urge we have as children – to play.

This instinct is central to how we learn, how we create, and how we live. Drawing on experience as a programmer, a designer, a writer, and a teacher, this presentation will discuss how that knowledge can inform our approach to the development process and the eventual player experience.

iDef 2008

Industry and Education working together – 14/8/08

Panel with Kurt Busch & Damon Raynor from Krome Melbourne

VITTA ICT Career Expo 2008

How I got a job playing games for a living – 2/8/08

Presentation – .mov

Video games don’t just appear from nowhere.  Somewhere, right now, there are people writing code, making art, designing levels and putting the finishing touches on games that will eventually find their way into PCs and consoles all over the world.  In Australia, there are around 2500 people doing just that and this number is expected to grow dramatically over the next 5 years.  In this presentation, Paul Callaghan, who has worked as a programmer, a game designer, and now a games teacher, will talk about how he found his way into the industry, how things have changed since then, how it’s possible to earn a living from it, and how it’s not all just sitting around playing games all day.

ACMI Game Girls Event

Workshop with Moran Paldi

Game developer and educator Paul Callaghan and games designer Moran Paldi will host a workshop where groups will get hands-on with the design process by conceiving a game around your favourite TV franchise.

Freeplay 2007

Independents Day

Panel presentation with Jonathan Blow and Robert J. Spencer – video; powerpoint

How can independents come up with earth-shattering ideas that change the face of gaming? What are the parameters of independent game making and who are the innovators outside of the big-publisher system? This session investigates innovation in independent gaming to date, and discusses where it might come from in the future.

Why I still really love you

Chair of panel with David Hewitt, Eve Penford-Dennis, and Andrei Nadin – video

Newbie game developers are everywhere, but their love of game development is often short lived; like puppy love it goes away real quick when the going gets rough. So how do great developers maintain the love through the tough times and, perhaps more importantly, why do they stick it out? Veteran insiders express the real reasons why they still love games development.

Freeplay 2005

What happens when you become a designer?

Panel discussion with Clint Reid and Kirsty Baird

Everyone has an idea for the best game ever, the most awesome combination of favourite game x plus sensational game y, but what is it really like to be a game designer?  These panellists talk about the experience of designing a game for the first time.

Game Stories: How to make yours much, much better.

Panel presentation with Mark Angeli and Jackie Turnure -   powerpoint

There are many ways to tell an interactive narrative – scripted sequences, cut scenes, emergent storylines to name a few – our panel of expers will argue about when to use what to improve your story and whether you need one at all.

Burning down the Shed.

Chair of panel with Greg Costikyan, Mark Angeli, and Katharine Neil

This is our Australian Indie Answer to the GDC’s ‘Burning down the house’ session.  Angry game developers vent their spleen.

You can find the article here, footage of me talking here, and footage from the panel discussion with Jim Shomos & Joe Velikovsky here.

The venue for the conference itself was amazing.  It was about 90 minutes from Adelaide, hidden quite well among the vineyards, and absolutely the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed in – the view from each room stretched out over trees and vineyards to spotted brown and green hills.  It was peaceful and relaxing and if I’d had more time, would have been a brilliant retreat.  I got here a day early and discovered that registration wasn’t until 1:00 on Wednesday, so I spent the morning out on the balcony in the quiet just writing.

In terms of the actual conference – I didn’t get to see as much as I would have liked, and the main session I came up to see on Wednesday about classic principles of screenwriting was sadly cancelled.  Of the sessions I did see, I got a lot out of hearing David Weiss, one of the writers of Shrek 2, and Darren Star, creator of Sex and the City, talk.  I was really struck by their focus on Story (with a capital S) and on strong emotional change in characters.  The classical structural nature of this really appeals to me and it inspired me to take a step back from my own projects and be more focused on the nature of a story’s emotional charge.  I also had an interesting conversation with Clayton Jacobson, the director of Kenny, about a range of things, but most interestingly about his approach to layering scenes.

My session on writing for games went well.  There was a lot of positive feedback afterwards and hopefully some new projects will emerge from it.  Thanks to Jim Shomos for setting things up and Joe Velikovsky for presenting with me.

The main focus of my presentation was on the key differences between traditional screenwriters and games writers, including what sort of skills they share and what sort of skills they’ll need to pick up.  I only had 30 minutes to talk and really wanted to use some real-world examples, so I had to focus on a few main areas:

Games are not stories

Obviously, some games have stories, but the user experience isn’t the same as traditional media.  One of the things that traditional screenwriters need to understand is that narrative games contain two stories – the story the game is telling you and also the story constructed by their gameplay experience.  I also wanted to emphasise the mechanical nature of games, and how for most of the time, a player isn’t interacting with story, but with what the gameplay actions are.  Mass Effect is a really good example of this because it’s clearly a heavily story driven game, but most of your time is spent driving around on planets or engaged in combat.

During our Q&A session at the end, Joe brought up Brenda Brathwaite’s comparison of games to opera rather than to screenwriting, which, I think, is a useful consideration when you’ve spent a lot of time immersed in film because singing + story is a far more easily understood model than gameplay + story.

Games have their own storytelling grammar

We can do things in games that we simply can’t do in film or prose or music.  The most useful aspect of this is, for me, the degree of seperation you have from emotionally engagement.  In prose, you’re 3 steps removed from that engagement.  You need to read and parse the words on the page, then imagine the scene and events, and then you’re in a position to connect with the story itself.  In film, you’re a step closer.  You still need to parse the visuals and the images meaning there’s less imagining required before you can engage with the story’s world, but you’re still a step removed from the characters.  You have an empathic response rather than a direct emotional response.  In games, because there’s a one to one connection with your actions and the events on the story, when done well, a game can directly manipulate you.  The 2 strongest examples of this for me have been Shadow of the Colossus and Bioshock.

Shadow of the Colossus is in many ways, an incredibly traditional game; the player’s goals are clear – to kill the colossi and save your girlfriend- but the way that it makes you question those goals while still encouraging you to achieve them creates a very strange, very direct, mixture of empathy, melancholy, anger, and tragedy that is only available because it’s you as the player performing the action of killing these creatures who were, really, just going about their day to day business.

The same goes for Bioshock.  As a game, it plays with notions of agency and gives the player a huge amount of choice in how they play the game before pulling the rug out from under their feet and showing that choice in Rapture, as it is in video games, is largely an illusion.

There is nothing to fear from choice

One of the common refrains heard from traditional writers about video games is that they won’t be able to craft an emotional experience because the nature of the medium deferes authorship to the player or the audience.  My position on that is that choice simply gives you another element in your narrative toolbox to engage the player.  Choice is nothing to be afraid of, but it does need to be controlled or bound, and there isn’t a single story-driven game out there that offers the player absolute freedom of choice.  Those games are simulation based, and while they may have fictional elements to provide the game’s metaphor, they are more about the player constructed stories than they are about a delivered narrative.

Writers have skills, but they need to serve the experience

Throughout the conference, there was the constant assertion that writers were at the heart of the film experience.  With games writing, this is a little different.  Design of player actions is at the core of games, not necessarily the story.  However, there are a lot of things that traditional writers do bring to games that have, until recently, been sadly neglected.  I’ve noticed that game developers can benefit from a focus on structure and pacing, on stronger character development, and on using symbolism and thematic writing.  It’s important to remember though that these things have to serve the game, that the story needs to serve the mechanics, and not the other way around.

You can find a copy of the presentation here.

The conference was the first time I’ve also seriously used twitter – made more palatable by having no internet other than my phone for the 4 days (I had a fairly strong reaction against paying 50c/minute for the hotel broadband).  I’m still not sure what I think of it, but it was fun, and a bit of a challenge to write updates that would work for both it and Facebook at the same time.

It was also the first time I’ve driven between cities.  Normally when I travel interstate, I just fly (said as though I do it all the time when, to be completely honest, this is only the 2nd time I’ve been to conferences out of the state), but I really wanted to see the space between the major hubs on this trip.  The thing that really struck me is how much of Australia is huge expanses of dust and brush and burnt out trees with little pockets of human settlement dotted along the way.  Even though it’s quite a long drive – 10 hours – I quite enjoyed it, and a lot of the scenery along the way, especially once I hit the Barossa valley, was breathtaking.

“The differentiation between games and films is blurring rapidly. As game graphics and other technical innovations reach a highpoint, games are depending more and more on character, story and plot… and traditional screenwriters are becoming a valuable resource for the games industry.

The major global film market (15-30yo) is spending more time and money on games than cinema – and the trend isn’t slowing. So is there a place for you in game writing? Do you have to be a user to appreciate the form? How do your skills translate to this exciting field? And is the sky really the limit? Find out how you can tap into this exciting writing opportunity from three internationally respected games writers.”

I’ll be on with Jim Shomos & Joe Velikovsky.  It’ll be an interesting panel, I think.  One of the things that I hope to stress is that games are not stories – they may contain stories, but they aren’t the core of the experience.  After hearing Zareh Nalbandian from Animal Logic talk at GCAP about convergence, I was struck by how there’s a big gap in what film people think games do and what they actually do.  His talk focused mostly on the things that narrative games share – strong stories and characters – and almost completely ignored the mechanic aspect of it.  I think there’s a lot that games can learn from traditional writers, but I think there’s a lot they have to learn about the medium before they can seamlessly make the transition.

I’ve also set up a professional development workshop with VITTA for March 27th titled Games for Learning and for meeting your VELS requirements as well! Details are:

“Games and Game Design allow a number of interconnected disciplines to interact with each other -from story writing to art to programming to design.  This workshop takes a game from its initial idea through various stages in development, demonstrating how traditional literacy and numeracy skills can be applied to game design, the planning process involved in games creation, how to deconstruct and manage large numbers of ideas, and how to brainstorm and creatively solve game related problems.”

I’m planning to blog and twitter the NSC.  Follow my twitter feed here.