On Friday evening, GDC announced that their conference is “postponed”. They’ll try to do an event later in the summer, but everyone’s plans for SF in two weeks are drifting smoke right now.

This is a tremendous disruption and disappointment for everybody involved — attendees, indie devs, speakers, event volunteers, corporate sponsors, restaurant and hotel workers — it’s a mess. But I am particularly upset to miss out on meetups with the other game designers I see every year at GDC. For me, the Narrative Summit track is the highlight of my GDC week.

So this is a good time to remind everybody that we’re running a conference on narrative games, adventures, and interactive fiction. It’s happening the weekend of May 29th in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

We’re not going to pretend that NarraScope is a replacement for GDC. We don’t have a soul-bleachingly large expo hall. We don’t have the IGF. We don’t have giant platform holders taking meetings.

What we do have is a few hundred of the brightest and most interesting folks in narrative design, all hanging out and exchanging ideas for a weekend. And we promise that Urbana-Champaign is way cheaper than San Francisco.

(Who’s going to be there? We haven’t announced the program, but I’ll tease you some names: Kaitlin Tremblay. Aaron Reed. Em Lazer-Walker. Judith Pintar. Cat Manning. Chris Klimas. Squinky. And, as we announced a few weeks ago, our keynote speaker, Xalavier Nelson Jr.)


Look. I’ve always been open about my goals for NarraScope. I want to take what’s great about the GDC Narrative Summit and open it up. Move it away from the sucking energy void that is a 25000-person for-profit industry event. Make it accessible and affordable for everybody.

NarraScope isn’t perfect in that regard, but it’s growing. We’d like it to grow more in 2020. So we hope it’s not presumptuous to take this as an opportunity. Please check out NarraScope 2020. It might be what you’re looking for.


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