Clash of Realities 2018 is just over. Because of a tight schedule we only managed to take part in the Summit day, on Tuesday the 13th of November.

The overall summit topics read quite interesting: Evolution of Visual Storytelling, Perspective of Narrative Design, Inclusive World of Games, Future in Digital Games, and Gender and Sexuality.

We spent our day in the “Game Development Summit: The Evolution of Visual Storytelling”. The schedule for the day and the list of speakers sounded promising, but unfortunately at the end of the day we left the conference a bit dissatisfied, we had expected more.

Christine Love

The talks themselves kept paddling around in the shallow end, with no surprises or real insights into the development. A silver lining was the talk of Christine Love (from Love Conquers All Games), who allowed us a peak under the hood, when she presented her internally developed writing tool, which helped to improve her productivity, by keeping the structure of the narrative under control in a clutter-free environment streamlined for her workflow.

Overall, we also kind of missed the guiding thread, regarding the summit topic. Everyone kind of presented their game and that was that. No visible thematic evolution and no real prospect for the future.

Panel Talk

We enjoyed the format of the event, the combination of academics and game developers is pretty unique. We just wished for a couple of new insights, or some fresh outlooks on the future of storytelling in games.

As stated earlier, we only visited the Game Development summit, so we cannot say anything about the other summits that took place. And of course the whole conference was free of charge, which is nothing to sneeze at. All in all, the general direction of the event is promising, but for next year we wish for a little more meat on the bone.

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep yourself up to date and informed. To exchange ideas and interact with other articy:draft users, join our communities on reddit and discord.