With Seamus Sullivan
Descrip: BREAKOUT: Form writing teams to create original game worlds, characters, and more through techniques that focus on the collaborative process.  Teams will leave with new content and ways to enhance older pieces.

• Start with a character and have a good idea about what the character wants.
• Think about all the details – what is their society, goals, interests, factions
• Think out conflict, potential drama.
• Simple stories can be interesting!
• Keep asking questions about your world and have others ask you questions as well.
• Build your world around a central theme and incorporate everything around that central theme.
• Ex: Bioshock.

• Think of your favorite video game character and write a short speech by that character.
• People were numbered, I am number 4
• 1 – political speech for president
• 2 – asking out someone they really like
• 3 – trying to get out of a speeding ticket
• 4 – telling their child why they have to stop picking fights on the playground
• 5 – asking the waiter to take back a food item due to a food allergy.

• Find that voice by putting the characters in different situations.
• Find out how they think, that they might say and do in any given point.

New exercise – collaborative writing excersize

• We are going to be given a genre.
• FPS
• RTS
• Role Playing Game
• Survival Horror Game
• Adventure Game
• Think of the world
• Think of a character who lives in the world
• Don’t be afraid to see how your stories are like other pre-existing stories, that’s a good thing. You just have to find the element(s) that make your story unique.

Creating a dialogue scene

• Have to write for scenarios, gives list of words that cannot be used. Usually words in the description of the scenarios.
• The idea being to force people to explain things in different ways than just telling them.
• Think of new distinctive ways to say things. The players will be used to hearing certain things, so pull them in with unusual text.