MIGS: Ken Rolston

Ken Rolston: Old guy you should listen to.I'm a few weeks late on this report from the Montreal International Game Summit, so let's see what we can do from memory only and no notes!

I found Ken Rolston's presentation to be accidentally highly self-referential. Before explaining that, let's look at his ridiculous summary of what is presentation was about:

The road to success as a narrative designer is long and arduous. But you don't want to hear that. So Ken Rolston, Internationally Celebrated Lead Designer of Oblivion, Morrowind, and other light classics, will reveal the carefully hoarded treasury of cheap tricks and short cuts that enable him to avoid Real Work. In this fast-paced and charming presentation, Rolston delivers the box of tools, lavishly illustrates their use in the production of Rolston's Great Works, and teaches you how to project a shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft of narrative game design.

I read that and thought, "wait, he's kidding right?" He avoids real work, he's charming, he's Internationally Celebrated with capital letters, and he will teach us to project a "shallow but persuasive mastery of the craft"? Ha!

I can't convey the actual content of his presentation because there was way too much. In fact, he started the presentation by explaining the "spew principle." If he spews so much information at us that we can't process it all, we'll have the warm feeling of discovery (of all the tools and principles he will spew), but no time to be critical. This will cause us to enjoy the talk and to like him, he said.

If you want a taste of the actual content, you can check out his terribly designed PowerPoint slides here. But I'd rather give you a sense of his tone. Ken mentions here and there how great he is, and we all know it's a joke (because we are not idiots from the internet, possibly?). He tells us how he manipulates his employees, players, and even us in the audience--and we laugh, but he's kind of not kidding. He's just on the edge of whether he's kidding or not, so you can't really be offended, but he sneaks in the sad truth.

The self-reference comes from these two pieces of advice Rolston gave us about narrative: 1) recognize that you have a distinctive voice, and that you should express it in game-narrative and 2) you probably want your world to be serious so it feels more real, but you also want to have the player and designer wink at each other, too.

I don't think it was really on purpose that Rolston's presentation embodied these two ideas: it's just how he is. He has a unique voice and he can't help but express it in a presentation. Also, his presentation is ultimately serious in that he explained many principles of narrative design, but he also seems to be delivering deadpan humor half the time, too. Take this example. Rolston explained that the type of game he makes involves having a big team of developers so a big part of his job is explaining his ideas to everyone. He showed a few simple techniques for this (making a clickable map of the game made of simple symbols, each location giving info from the point of view of the locals who live there), but he also had some management tips for us....

Bad Chemicals

He said he brings a giant box of donuts to work in the morning. They are the most sugary ones he can find and filled with "bad chemicals." He says

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