The Nebula Conference & Events

Narrative design is often misunderstood as being a synonym for game writing, but good narrative design combines the tools of storytelling, game design, and narrative strategy to help bring a game to life. This panel brings together narrative designers to talk about the ways that narrative systems deliver, shape, and change storytelling – and how their own work in this field has evolved and grown over time.

Video games are the most lucrative entertainment industry sector, with 65% of the US population playing regularly. What can SFF authors writing in non-game mediums — novelists, writers of short stories, novellas and novelettes, etc. — learn from gaming? What do video games teach us about world-building? How is video game storytelling the ultimate example of “show, don’t tell,” and what techniques can writers extract from it to use in a non-visual medium? How do video games create compelling characters with a spare minimum of dialogue/description, and how can we as authors learn to do the same? While our readers may not be able to control our stories as directly as players in a game, what can we learn from gaming to create the same feeling of first-person urgency through deep POV? What video game titles in particular do panelists feel have the most to teach us as SFF authors?