It's a new year, and that means the 2017 Game Developers Conference is right around the corner. Conference organizers are putting together a top-notch event this year, including an important GDC Narrative Summit talk about writing better games by breaking commonly-used molds of marginalized characters.
Shawn Allen is a longtime game developer currently working on Treachery in Beatdown City, and in his GDC 2017 talk on "Breaking Marginalized Character Narrative Molds to Write Better, Richer Characters" he'll speak to his lived experience as a black game designer, writer, and cultural critic.
This is important because Allen will talk about why, in the video game space, there is a yearning to create more black and brown characters, and yet the results are usually mixed, with bad representations being the most common output. He'll also speak about how he approached creating dozens of characters of various ethnic groups in a fictional New York, and how he too has stumbled on his way.
While there isn't some magic rubric to solve everyone's issues, Allen aims to present some best practices that can ameliorate the process and empower attendees with confidence in how they can do better at creating black characters -- and more.
Don't miss this talk, and don't miss your opportunity to save money by registering early -- the deadline to register for passes at a discounted rate is January 18, 2017. GDC 2017 itself will take place February 27th - March 3rd at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
For more information on GDC 2017, visit the show's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Facebook, Twitter, or RSS.
