Go here, and watch the Artgame Sessions. The sound is a little fucky because I was talking too loud into the mic, but you’ll get the basic idea.

Hope you enjoy it. If nothing else, I’m sure you’ll dig the other talks: Iriquois Pliskin gave a great talk about Braid, Jason Rohrer defended Terry Cavanagh’s Judith, and Frank Lantz compared Messhof to Sid Vicious. It was pretty good.

Yesterday, I gave a talk at UC Berkeley about character development and player identity in story-driven videogames. You can listen to a full recording of the talk and subsequent Q&A session here.

The PowerPoint presentation I used can be downloaded from here, but it’s not 100% necessary. Without the PowerPoint, it’s just a one-man podcast where a group of people laugh every twenty minutes for no immediately discernible reason. Which may have its own weird charm.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the talk. I enjoyed giving it.

If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, then I’ve got one hell of a treat for you!

On Monday night, I’m going to be giving a talk at UC Berkeley for this class. I was originally going to title the talk “Player, Character,” but that seemed really fucking pretentious, so it doesn’t really have a title anymore. Either way, it’s about character development in story-based videogames (a la Mass Effect, or Uncharted). The talk is scheduled to start at 6pm, in 123 Wheeler. I assume you can’t actually show up unless you’re actually UC Berkeley student, but I figured I’d mention it on the off chance.

On Friday the 11th, I’m going to be part of the Artgame Sessions panel at GDC. The specifics are here. I’ll be giving a ten minute talk about Far Cry 2, which should surprise absolutely nobody who listens to Podtoid.

I’ll post the slides and notes for both talks on this site sometime in the middle of March.