Creating Emotional Touchstones in Emergent Narrative

In this panel, Matthew Farber, Sande Chen, Kimberly Unger, and Juliana Loh discuss the importance of emotional touchstones in emergent narrative and how it's done in different types of games.

Many thanks to Fellow Traveller Games for organizing a great program of panels on narrative games! The panels are on YouTube, including ours on emergent narrative.

LudoNarraCon 2020
Panel: Creating Emotional Touchstones in Emergent Narrative

Games have a unique ability to establish empathy between a player and a world and characters, but game players don’t always follow the path the narrative lays out for them. This panel discusses how designers and storytellers can build in empathic elements that can be found and engaged with even when the larger narrative gets delivered out of order.

This panel originally aired during LudoNarraCon 2020, digital festival celebrating narrative games, hosted on Steam and organized by Fellow Traveller Games.

Matthew Farber, Ed.D. is an Assistant Professor of Technology, Innovation and Pedagogy at the University of Northern Colorado. His research is at the intersection of game-based learning and social and emotional learning (SEL). Dr. Farber has been invited to the White House, to keynote for UNESCO, and he has been interviewed about games and learning by NPR, Fox News Radio, EdSurge, The Denver Post, USA TODAY and The Wall Street Journal. Farber's book, Gamify Your Classroom: A Field Guide to Game-Based Learning -- Revised Edition (2017) features a foreword from Greg Toppo. His latest book, Game-Based Learning in Action: How an Expert Affinity Group Teaches with Games (2018), has a foreword from James Paul Gee. To learn more, visit: MatthewFarber.com 

Sande Chen is the co-author of Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform. As a serious games consultant, she helps companies harness the power of video games for non-entertainment purposes. Her career as a writer, producer, and game designer has spanned over 15 years. Her game credits include 1999 Independent Games Festival winner Terminus and the 2007 PC RPG of the Year, The Witcher, for which she was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award in Videogame Writing. She has spoken at conferences around the globe, including the Game Developers Conference, Serious Play Conference, and Games For Change. 

Kimberly Unger made her first videogame back when the 80-column card was the new hot thing and after 20+ years as a pro in that industry, the magic still hasn’t faded. Now she sources leading-edge content for Oculus, lectures on the intersection of art and code for UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering, wrangles a monthly column on science-fiction in videogames over at Amazing Stories and writes science fiction about how all these app-driven superpowers are going to change the human race. Her debut novel, NUCLEATION will be out in November of 2020. You can find her on Twitter at @Ing3nu or on her blog at www.ungerink.com. 

Juliana Loh is an independent Producer/Artist whose background includes branded entertainment, UX and art direction. In addition to developing educational/gaming experiences, she has honed her artistic skills as a concept and gallery-showing artist while pioneering, empowering and supporting grassroots tech meetups and communities. Currently working as an instructor and immersive artist, she is keenly aware of how emerging technology is changing the way we relate to each other. She is currently working on a Pro-Kindess Immersive project that is based on user-centered thinking.