This past weekend I attended AdventureX, a narrative games conference hosted by the University of Greenwich in London. Of course, among my many talents, remembering to take pictures when I travel or participate in events like this is not one of them, so you’ll have to be satisfied with text instead.
Full disclosure, this year I did some behind-the-scenes work on the event in two capacities: first, as unofficial cat-wrangler for the demo reviewer team that tested and provided feedback on the more than 80 demo submissions we received from people hoping to exhibit; and second, as part of the selection committee that sifted through those reviews as well as the speaker applications to put together the slate of exhibitors and speakers for this year’s event. I was not paid for any of this work, as AdventureX is entirely volunteer-run, but I do have a very close relationship with this particular conference.
What I love most about AdventureX is its very simple proposition: a conference for people who care about adventure games and their narrative cousins. For people who have always cared about adventure games, even when the video game press was ready to declare the whole genre dead, and long before any of the periodic narratives about the genre making a comeback first made the rounds—these are the people who have always been there, building these games and playing them and sharing their enthusiasm for the genre as a whole.
With this pinpoint focus, the conference is free to be, well, itself. The screens in the exhibition hall featured far more pixels than polygons. The marketing budgets of the developers there combined probably couldn’t fund three months of development on the next Call of Duty. Traditional, throwback pixel-art point-and-clicks sat alongside horror-themed walking sims, a papercraft music video player, and a game in which you turn a crank to act as the replacement motor for a malfunctioning victrola.
The lecture hall was packed for a presentation on little-known point-and-clicks from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, which sat alongside talks on narrative anarchy, localization for small developers, and how to tackle real-world, difficult subjects in games. A few of these talks might fit in at the broader, bigger game conferences, but many of them only work because of what AdventureX is and who it’s for.
And who is it for? People who believe that games can tell impactful stories, real stories, and that stories can be reason enough to play a game. I think that’s why I find this particular conference to be such a breath of fresh air. As a narrative designer, I often find that my job is to figure out how to design stories for people who do not want to pay attention to them. AdventureX is the rare space where no one questions that a story might be enough to bear the weight of a game.
Over the next month or so, videos of the conference talks will be uploaded to youtube. In the meantime, the stream archive is currently still accessible on twitch (though who knows for how long.)
You can find Day 1 here.
You can find Day 2 here.
I definitely recommend Tom Jubert’s talk on Narrative Anarchy and the aforementioned talk on games from Eastern Europe and the Balkans from Day 1, and Francisco Gonzalez’s talk on how to give the player more positive feedback from Day 2, but honestly, the slate was so packed with strong (and wonderfully niche) offerings, you can hardly go wrong.