Narrascope 2025 Talks
Subjects vary from interactive fiction tools to writing best practices and everything in between. Previous talks had titles like “Choosing Your Happily Ever After”, “Shaping Your Story with Emotional Intelligence” and “Adapting Film’s Techniques for Nonlinear Stories”, to give you a bit of an idea.
We’re looking for talks that explore the field in detail. Our net is being cast wide to get as many perspectives as possible, in order to serve up a conference rich with information for gamers, writers, academics, and aficionados alike.
Speakers and panelists will receive a complimentary membership in NarraScope 2024. We also offer a small honorarium. The amount depends on fundraising, but in the past has been around US$100.
We are hoping that most of our speakers can attend the event in person to present their talks. If this is not possible, or if you have specific needs, please contact us and we will work to accommodate you. We cannot cover travel or other expenses for speakers.
Important Dates
This year’s talk selection process will feature a two-cycle review system. This is a new way for us to organize our talk review process which will provide extended opportunities for submitters across the world of narrative game design to send in their proposals.
We encourage anyone planning to submit a proposal to send it in by February 7th. However, if you need extra time, we will continue to accept proposals until February 21st. Proposals submitted on or before February 7th will receive first consideration from reviewers, and first-cycle submitters receive notification of acceptance before the end of February.
- February 7th, 2025: First Cycle Submission Deadline
- February 21st, 2025: Second Cycle Submission Deadline & First Cycle Results Notification
- March 7th, 2025: Second Cycle Results Notification
- March 14th, 2025: Confirmation Deadline for Accepted Proposals
- June 20th-22nd, 2025: Narrascope 2025 Conference Dates
Presentation Formats
Lightning Talks (15 minutes)
Lightning Talks are brief explorations of a topic in great detail, or the sharing of specialized information. Want to talk about one particular piece of poetry, and why it changed the entire theme of a game? How about an overview of how quest items were used to further the plot? Q&A duration is to the presenter's preference.
Standard Presentation (30 minutes)
These talks should focus on everything from the very technical to comparative and informational. This is not a time to sell your game or self-promote. We want to hear how you made your game, what you learned, what games you’ve studied, and what knowledge or ideas that you have that can help push the genre forward. Standard presentations typically include 5 minutes for Q&A.
In-Depth Presentation (60 minutes)
The same focus as a standard presentation, but for talks that require a little more time. In-depth presentations may include up to 10 minutes for Q&A.
Panel Discussion (60 Minutes)
A panel or multi-person discussion. We prefer that you suggest names for panelists.
Tips
- We want in-depth discussions about specific fields or styles of IF, narrative writing, and game design. Orient newcomers, but get into the good stuff.
- Everybody at the conference will already know what interactive fiction is and why narrative games are important. What’s the next question?
- Specifics are always better than overviews.
- Talk about a problem you solved or a problem you didn’t solve.
- Tell us something that your players and fellow authors don’t know about your workflow. Show your work. Show your spreadsheet.
- Who hasn’t been heard? What have we missed?
- Find the sweet spot between “so obscure that I can’t make use of it” and “so well-known that I learned it in school.” Tell us something that makes us want to run off and start a new project just to try it out.
- Reveal a wonderful secret.
Have a look at last year's schedule, or refer to this springboard of possible topics:
Histories of interactive fiction, adventure games, or lost subgenres ‧ Teaching narrative games ‧ Art contexts and narrative games ‧ Narrative gaming and computing subcultures (the demoscene, etc.) ‧ Identity, trauma, sex, and other challenging topics in narrative games ‧ Design tricks lifted from other kinds of games ‧ Simulating worlds ‧ Strengths of new development systems/platforms ‧ Postmortems on particular games ‧ Readings/critical discussions ‧ Modeling conversations, characters, or environments ‧ Representation and appropriation of culture ‧ Interactive narrative outside of videogames: television, museum exhibits, LARP, interactive theater ‧ Puzzles: do we have a grand theory after forty-five years? ‧ Tools to manage narrative complexity ‧ Domain-specific languages of IF and narrative design ‧ Archiving and preserving narrative games ‧ What different types of players want from narrative games