About the Panel

In this casual panel we explore games and developers who faced the difficult challenge of ending their games. The panel will go over the topics such as branching narratives and how multiple endings function, the impression that a game leaves at the end of the experience, and the challenges which were faced in bringing everything together in a conclusive and satisfying manner.

Panelists

George Ziets, Annie VanderMeer, Mrten Rattasepp, Ata Sergey Nowak

Ata Sergey Nowak

Ata Sergey Nowak is a game developer from Germany with an intercultural background. Eight years ago, his passion for games began to transform into a professional career, since then he worked on several games like Hearts of Iron 3: Their Finest Hour, East vs West, Squad, Terminal Conflict and acclaimed mods like Black ICE and Project Reality. While studying in Turkey, his experiences of political tension and instability inspired him to work on a new game to dive deeper in the subject. This led to the creation of Suzerain; a political narrative game where the player steps in the shoes of Anton Rayne, an upcoming President of Sordland in a fictional 50's universe.

Annie VanderMeer

Annie VanderMeer has been in the game industry since 2004, working on both AAA and indie projects, and in both design and writing roles. In 2009 she helped start DoubleBear Productions, was a senior writer/designer on their first title (Dead State) as well as directing its successful Kickstarter campaign, and the project lead on the second (PANIC! at Multiverse High). She has also contributed to tabletop projects (such as Fantasy FlightsThe Legacy of Dragonholt, Arkham Horror, andThe Legend of the Five Rings), and freelance narrative design for the upcoming gameUnpacking. In 2019 she founded the Tiamat Collective - an organization for creatives of all stripes to find exciting opportunities and provide guidance to one another and in very early 2020 she released a solo project,The Passenger, onitch.io. Her work has spanned from bizarre comedy to grim realism, genres from horror to high fantasy, and humor from dry wit to fart jokes. Annie is currently working full-time as a senior game designer at ArenaNet, as well as freelancing in the occasional writing gig to ""keep her skills sharp"" (as well as a chance to write dumb lines about jalapeo poppers).

Mrten Rattasepp

Mrten is an ex-academic with a background in literary and cultural theory/criticism, with a side of semiotics, philosophy and classical philology. During his researcher days he focused mostly on modernism-postmodernism-amodernism, historiography and metafiction. Over the past ten years he has written a whole heap of reviews of books, movies, theatre and music, although that's been happening less as of late. After several years of grinding away at the analytical-theoretical angle, he decided not to pursue a doctorate (at least for the moment), and instead stumbled into video game writing. Starting off, Mrten worked as a Writer and Editor for Disco Elysium, then as a Lead Writer / Narrative Designer for Death and Taxes. He enjoys going on lengthy, several-hour-long walks (daily, if at all possible) and occasionally playing the drums (at a mediocre skill level). He currently works as a Narrative Designer for Digimancy Entertainment.

George Ziets

George Ziets has been a narrative designer and writer since 2001. He spent the first part of his career on MMOs like Lord of the Rings Online and D&D Online before running off to make more traditional RPGs. While working at Obsidian Entertainment and InXile, he designed or contributed to branching narratives on RPGs like Wasteland 3, Pillars of Eternity, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer, Fallout: New Vegas, and many more. In 2019, George co-founded a new RPG studio, Digimancy Entertainment, where hes hard at work on a super-secret, publisher-funded project.

[ 2021-04-20 12:17:40 CET ] [ Original post ]