Sometimes I talk to people about common narrative game structures like the ones in

heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/sta…

and they get worried because they want to see something that looks like a Hollywood three-act structure. Of course it has a lot of variants, but I'm talking about something that looks loosely like

A good thread about what it means to be successful in a creative field; how complicated it is to even measure that; and how it gets harder still if you're doing something that doesn't look mainstream.

https://twitter.com/malindalo/status/1357388110938710016

This really resonated with me, and at the same time, this:

"For me, success can only be an honest, internal evaluation: Have I written the best thing I could write?"

...also doesn't work. (I'm glad it works for others! But I've had to find different things.)

I retweeted this yesterday, and it's a great thread.

I've been thinking about it more since, as well as the methods I use to try to proof against the problems that I know are almost definitely going to turn up despite my best efforts.

https://twitter.com/danctheduck/status/1344357310399877120

a few things I find helpful (not by any means a complete list):

- document design intent. even when working alone, but especially when working with a team, it's easy to add a feature, discover in testing that the feature isn't working, and then get hung up on fixing the feature

Thread on what it really means to look for marginalised contributors in your spaces.

https://twitter.com/WhyGaze/status/1288494080243011584

The applications of this go far beyond publishing.

Over the years I've done a lot of work at the boundaries of different communities, as an editor, curator, competition judge, advisor for industry conferences and program committee member for academic ones, as a hiring manager.

0/ Tracking down racist bugs in our own programming - a thread. 1/ Some years ago I read studies that progressive college professors were more responsive to white male students and least responsive to women of colour.

A thread about narrative states.

Suppose we have a dating sim where outcome is decided by the player's relationship stats to three characters, and the player has loads of chances to increase relationship with any/all of them. It can be tricky to reason about the design of this. However, suppose we calculate percentage of interest in each character: darcy_percentage = darcy_likes / (darcy_likes + wickham_likes + collins_likes .

Now we can chart this on a ternary plot. ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_p… ) Three suitors, four story outcomes.

Thinking a lot lately about virtue as skill.

- doing the right thing is a matter of judgment, courage and habit, not just meaning well
- moral courage can be cultivated; you're not limited to current supply
- it is helpful to have thought about hard issues before facing them examples:

I struggle to resist certain types of emotional pressure or manipulation. Usually, the only negative consequence is that I tire myself out responding to emotively-phrased requests.

I think a lot about what good citizens we could be in a world with UBI, how much time we'd have to participate in politics. What schools would be like if more adults had time to spend with the young. What scholarship would be like if more people had time to be mature learners

https://twitter.com/madlori/status/1153729750738833414

all the best stuff I've done ("best" = "demonstrably useful to others," "made someone's life better," "was IMO good art") was motivated by something other than money, even if I happened also to be compensated for it.

and I think I'm not at all unusual in that regard

Acknowledging emerging tech that opens new possibilities: text to speech, style transfer, automated animation #Narrascope Q: how can procedural narrative hide that it is made of consistent blocks? A: vary form as well as content; don’t show the same template blocks too often; make use of player buy-in.

#Narrascope Katherine Morayati on how to write IF like a pop song — starting with how music production compares with cinema production #NarraScope strong pitch from Katherine on how formula and structure are worth studying as part of the core of our craft

At the Telltale tool talk, where Zac Litton and Carl Muckenhoupt are speaking about tooling, including challenges to visualising a dialogue with 15K lines #narrascope #narrascope “a lot of our tool philosophy was... about getting us quickly to the 70% point, and then we could polish and edit”

Chris Gardiner talking on the challenges of making a game that built on 137 pages of lore from past work... and also accessible to new players. The initial concept involved hallucinatory interactions with incomprehensible space powers

@RuberEaglenest @thing_stuff Okay. So the way this was set up:

- there was a game to run on the big screen at the front of the room
- I also had a two-page script of instructions about how to MC the game, in particular things like timings and controls @RuberEaglenest @thing_stuff - there were a number of points for audience participation, and as prompts for these, there were big colorful laminated cards distributed through the audience (though not enough for every person to have one -- it was more "several people in your row of seats will have cards"

.@joethephish talking about how reading in a game should feel effortless, requiring good writing and good UX Calls out the value of focus and pacing; having less text on screen at a time; not surrounding it with distracting icons and imagery