Workshop : World Building for Videogames
Led by Clara Fernández Vara
Where: Hexagram Resource Room
When: February 28 (1-5pm) & March 1 (10-4pm)
About the workshop: The medium of videogames is generating new narrative paradigms, which invite developers, storytellers and artists to focus on the practice of world building. The growing discipline of world building also serves as the foundation for transmedia storytelling, which allows creating different media incarnations of the same world. A consistent knowledge of world building is therefore an essential skill in 21st century media production.
Expansive fictional worlds provide videogames with narrative depth, as well as a logical consistency that helps players understand the rules of the game. This workshop will provide an introduction to world building in videogames, from the principles of narrative game design to the key components of world creation (rules of the world, history, characters, conflict and problem-solving). The workshop combines an overview of the theoretical approaches to world building with game conceptualization and prototyping exercises. The prototypes will be non-digital, which means that attendees do not need to know computer programming to participate.
Clara Fernández Vara is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the MIT Trope Tank, and has worked at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Her work concentrates on adventure games, as well as the integration of stories in simulated environments. She is particularly interested in cross-media artifacts from the standpoint of textual analysis and performance.
Clara holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She earned a BA in English Studies by the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2000), and was awarded a fellowship from the La Caixa Foundation to pursue a
TO SIGN UP: Please send an email to Mia Consalvo at mconsalvo@gmail.com by January 31 to ensure your spot. Please note that attendance will be limited, and so you should sign up early. In order to attend you must commit to attending both days of the workshop. Thursday, February 28 the workshop will run from 1-5pm and on Friday, March 1 it will be held from 10-4pm. For more information please email Mia.