How to Write Games for the Internet without Embarrassing Yourself

[Music] hi everybody thank you for coming to an hour-long session on the last day of GDC at 10:00 a.m. I appreciate it I'm supposed to say if they told me to say anything [ __ ] what I said [ __ ] oh no we are off to a really good start guys don't don't use flash because it scares me if turn off turn off noise making things all right hi I'm Leighton gray I'm the co-creator co-writer and our director and I guess head daddy of dream daddy a dad dating simulator the dating sim where you play as a hot dad and your goal is to meet in romance other hot dad's and today I'm here to talk to you about something that's really serious and very important and just really close to my heart in a sentimental way and that's oh boy don't ruin my gag no and

that's memes or more specifically how to write and market games for the internet without embarrassing yourself too much step 1 don't do this let's talk about why dream daddy was a product of the internet and there was a lot of intentionality and how he wrote designed and marketed it towards online communities like Tumblr Twitter and YouTube and while we were working on the game we were kind of making all of these creative choices in a vacuum unsure if these ideas we had seeded in the game to get people to share it would actually work or not and when we announced the game and subsequently released it we finally got to see what worked and what didn't and we were thankfully largely successful we landed ourselves at the top selling game on Steam globally on launch day and we were named the third most trending game on tumblr for 2017 and knocked overwatch off the top spot for the first time in months which is exciting and I don't know about you guys but it was pretty much impossible to go on any social

media without seeing a ton of posts about how much people wanted to kiss these dads so in this talk I'm going to break down how we engineered the game from its inception to be as shareable as possible and how you can apply these same principles to your work as well and to understand what gets people to share let's begin by talking about what really really doesn't you may have seen this internal Google document that was leaked a while ago called it's lit which covers what the cool teens think is dank and on fleek and if there's one thing I know about cool teens it's the only thing they love more than the Beatles and Coldplay is bowing down to our corporate overlords by relying on brands to shape their world as the kids say s mhm and because companies follow clueless internal documents like this one they do stuff like this and this is a whole Twitter account that just collects brands being horrific ly out of touch a

bunch of grown people sat at a table and we're like this is our marketing strategy we're doing great so obviously nobody likes it when a 35 year old PR dude tells you that it's on fleek to buy a roast beef sandwich and another big issue here is that when brands do stuff like this it shows that they're hearing consumers but they're not actually listening and with an ever increasing awareness of and skepticism towards transparent marketing ploys and pandering it's more important than ever to have a deep working understanding of the community your game is for so that you don't get endlessly dunked on by an army of 15 year olds on Twitter and we talked about this in dream daddy for a little bit when your teenage when you ask your teenage daughter to explain memes to you there's eggy so Amanda says dad it's complicated see memes are inside jokes shared by a bunch of people that get less funny the more people do it so the problem is that by a time Amin gets to you dad all of us youths have already done the joke to

death and what's worse than that is that movies and TV and video games will try to jump in on a meme train but just based on how long it takes to make them the mean will be long dead by the time it comes out so it just dates it and isn't funny and then of course you say oh [ __ ] what up because we're hacks so if trying to incorporate memes into your work is the kiss of death how do we effectively write content that exists adjacent to Internet culture without directly referencing it and how can we take concrete steps to encourage the organic spread of our work and to answer that question I'm going to talk about every game developers favorite topic art history yay and if it's not obvious from literally everything about me I dropped out of art school so modernism was the first major art movement of the early 20th century it came in on the heels of the Romantic movement which was all about aesthetic izing intense emotion and it was extremely melodramatic and

lofty so in response modernism focused on defying the traditional ideas of the 19th century and this also coincided with the Industrial Revolution this movement encouraged artists and writers to try new things and explore on Orthodox ideas with enthusiasm and to question everything artists like Picasso Duchamp Kandinsky and writers like James Joyce and Marcel Proust are perfect examples of meta modernism they were all doing things nobody had seen before and as we approach the mid to late 20th century the reaction to modernism was post modernism while modernism was more of an art movement than anything else post modernism was just as much a philosophical movement intended to critique society and culture as it was an art movement and as a whole post modernism can be defined by a heavy sense of cynicism and irony towards everything there's a huge emphasis on nihilism the idea that truth is a subjective construct and it made things like parity and pastiche popular and the big element of post modernism was intertextual 'ti and references to other

media for instance scream is a really great example because it repeatedly references and subverts horror movie tropes for post-modernism just a bunch of imagine a bunch of artists in black turtlenecks chain-smoking and generally just being miserable but remember post-modernism because we will get back to it in a minute because a lot has changed since the postmodern movement started and one of the biggest changes has been the advent of the internet post-modernism doesn't really give us the tools that we need to meaningfully navigate a relationship with current content because the Internet has had such a huge impact on the way that we create consume and share media and so much of an impact that we're currently experiencing a huge cultural shift from mass media to social media we've gone from a top-down model of distribution to a participatory culture where consumers are not just consumers of static unchanging content they're people who are reshaping Andry mixing the context and meaning of media and the language that currently exists around content that becomes successful on the internet unnecessarily mystifies this

entire process when we say something goes viral we're robbing both the content creator and the audience of their agency like we're passively infecting each other with content which is not how it works and consulting marketing and PR firms will dangle this concept of going viral above your head to get you to give them money into intentionally muddy the process of what it takes to create a successful product and we can even track where this kind of thinking originated the term meme was introduced in 1976 in Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene as the cultural corollary of the gene the idea being that a meme propagates itself in a way similar to genes and I kid you not he uses the phrase mean pool which is a pretty fun mental image and this sort of biological metaphor is a big reason why we oversimplify this process down to virality and of course memes have been around a long long time before we had a name for them humans figuring out how to start fire is a meme it did not

necessarily look like this but it is still a me and I'll have you know that I worked really really hard to get this as artifact as possible idioms are memes metaphors are memes tropes and media are memes a meme is just an idea an idea that can spread and mutate and be improved upon even with less cool paintings artistic movements are defined by a certain collection of memes like guys I hate to break it to you but even the great masters we're just doing like really exceptional Jesus fan art like all it's missing is the flower crown and in the 19th century women's scrapbooking culture revolved around cutting interesting tidbits out of books and newspapers and collecting them in a single place so they were easily shareable which is pretty much just old timey Pinterest down to the weird obsession with mason jars I mean one could even say that it's uncanny you guys love blasphemy but you won't

stand for Dada puns okay you came to the dream daddy talk did you really think I was not going all right my point is the internet just accelerates behaviors we were already doing and we as members of a network community choose to share content that's meaningful to us so instead of placing the onus on this seemingly unknowable magical phenomenon virality it's more productive for us as game developers to analyze how we can imbue content with the kind of meaning that will compel people to share and this idea to counter virality is called spread ability the intersection of quality is that optimized content for sharing through social media this model recognizes that the driving force behind what we share comes from a social place and that our lives aren't defined by brands rather we use the media we consume to facilitate conversations that we're already having just like humans have always done with all forms of art from the beginning of time which brings us back around to art movements how can we tap into this collective culture and figure out what

will make people share when Internet culture is so nebulous and ever shifting I mean you ever go without checking Twitter for a couple of days and then you come back and you're like the [ __ ] is everybody talking about like it's a daunting task and I can often feel like you're trying to hit a moving target but by understanding the art movement that we're currently on the cusp of it can take some of the guesswork out of it so on a sliding scale of sincerity and cynicism with modernism being very sincere and post-modernism being very cynical what does that mean for the current state of art and philosophy how could we possibly describe this emerging culture of media born from the internet I don't know that's the talk by I will tell you in a second it's meta modernism this is the part where I died on stage all right which in a nutshell is a movement defined by ironic

detachment with sincere engagement the meta modernist manifesto was written by artist Luke Turner and the man the meme the legend himself Shia LaBeouf here's a basic rundown of the core tenets of meta modernism it acknowledges that prescribing exclusively to either solely modern or postmodern ideas limits our ability to tell robust complex stories and that the best storytelling comes from oscillating between two poles primarily sincerity and cynicism but also a highbrow and lowbrow optimism and doubt relativism and truth etc like it reflects real life our lives are not just solely one thing or one thing like it's kind of a mixed bag and this is where the meta prefix comes from not in the sense that something is self-aware or self referential in a meta way although it can be and often is it comes from the word medic see meaning and in between this it also aims to collapse the distances between disparate groups of people it acknowledges the

layered identity as we present both online and in real life and finally it embodies a sense of radical optimism and self-love in the face of decades of post-modernism unbridled cynicism one of the most notable things about meta modernism is that the parameters are extremely loose media doesn't have to ascribe to all these tenets to be considered meta modern and this idea is commonly referred to in meta modern text as an effective feeling since meta modern media often borrows mutates and remixes elements from modernism and post-modernism I like to compare it to early 2000s fashion but just with less of just whatever that is you can combine and pay homage to many different tropes and feelings to create something totally new that doesn't feel as tired as a lot of postmodern tropes do at this point to put all this in perspective let's look at some games that I would consider postmodern versus a few I think art firmly meta modern oh no hello this is

Shia LaBeouf I'm actually going to talk about Shia LaBeouf first that's what's happened what's happening now so Shia LaBeouf has done a lot of really really interesting things with meta meta modern media if you'll recall a couple years ago he did this performance art piece that was called I am NOT a a hashtag I am NOT sorry where he sat in a room with a bag over his head that said I am NOT famous anymore and if you recall the way the media kind of reported on this it was very much like like at those wild celebs they're at it again and what actually happened is that people would go in you know expecting it to be something silly like that and they would come in and they'd take the bag off of shai his head because it was a very high art kind of thing where he's just sitting in a room and you could kind of do whatever you wanted with him so they take the bag off of his head and he'd be crying and then this person who is only ever known about Shia LaBeouf as like this celebrity this symbol suddenly has this like very real moment with him and a lot of people would start crying

themselves and they would like hold his hand and try to console him and actually have like a much more meaningful experience and I highly recommend that anybody go check out Shia LaBeouf's other work he's done a lot of really interesting performance art pieces aside from getting arrested for public intoxication intoxication in Savannah Georgia which is a for a place with open container laws that's hard to do anyway now let's talk about games that are postmodern the Stanley parable and portal both deconstruct traditional ideas surrounding player agency in a game like sonic Dreams collection lampooned Sonic fan culture in the late 90s and all three of these games are pretty resounding ly cynical and feature varying degrees of subversion in their respective genres post-modernism progressing past this era of postmodern work we have games like undertale undertale and doki doki literature club the distinction here is that both games are deconstructions of deconstructions undertale is particularly notable in this sense because it plays with RPG tropes in several different ways the

fact that the player is constantly faced with choosing between pacifism and violence and then has to live what the consequences is very meta modern because again it's that oscillation between those poles without totally reconciling them and then you have characters who are aware of your previous actions and comment on them and breaking the fourth wall by making direct appeals to the player so doki-doki literature club sorry to leave you guys hanging is on one level a deconstruction and commentary on a lighthearted dating sim and all the trappings of the genre your childhood best friend huh blank slate male main character takes place in a high school anime titty and then as the game starts to take a darker turn it starts playing off of horror tropes as well and then becomes extremely meta once Monaco addresses the player directly the game manages to be simultaneously cutesy sweet and endearing and while also just absolutely horrific it allows the player to hold both ideas at once and I believe

that it's no coincidence that these two games have enjoyed a lot of success and have garnered massive fandoms because ultimately meta modernism is the source of all internet culture and it informs the sensibilities of some of the most popular media right now such as Rick and Morty the music of childish gambino Bojack horseman bo burnham stand up black mirror and Homestuck which i put in there because apparently it's 2012 so let's break down what each of these core tenants really mean and how we utilize these ideas to make dream daddy a success so sincerity wrapped in cynicism is the really really big one that if you remember one thing from this talk remember that the guiding idea of meta modernism is pretty well embodied by this Jerry Saltz quote I know that the our time creating may seem silly or stupid and it might have been done before but that doesn't mean that this isn't serious and by wrapping a sincere story in this cynical exterior you're basically Trojan horsing meaning into

your game I kind of like to think of it like salted caramel like you get the salty and the sweet and they both bring out the best in each other and now I'm really hungry but a perfect example of this in a game that dream daddy would not exist without is how to filet friend the pigeon dating sim yes I know you like kissing birds thank you and what clearly looks like a very silly game where you play as a human girl dating birds has been pretty widely regarded as one of the best dating Sims out there players praised the surprisingly well-written story and sprawling Lord so this is a particularly effective technique that also worked for us setting the players expectations low with the promise of something silly or weird dating birds kissing dad's and then doing a bit of a bait-and-switch with a story that's actually meaningful because let's face it it's really hard to just tell a serious story at face value on the internet we have to steep it in a few layers of irony so it's palatable because the Internet has ruined all of our brains and just turned us into whatever [ __ ] up sense of

humor the Internet has done to us I really don't understand it but if dream daddy was instead just called like favourable fathers and was a straightforward story about the experience of being a single dad it would have been seen as a little overly sentimental you know you got to put Daddy in the title gets him in the door and because people unfortunately already tend to have low expectations of dating Sims as a genre we were able to pleasantly surprise players with a story with hidden depths because one second you're hanging out with the goth dad who loves shopping at Hot Topic and writing his own smadi Naruto fiction that he then gets leather-bound and in the next he's giving a monologue in a graveyard about how death helps him appreciate his life more and even though the game is about dating dad's it's also pretty heavily about the experience of growing up in a single-parent household and that resonated with people next collapsing distances I'm going to collapse the distance between me in this water hydration is important because the

Internet is an incredible tool for connecting us with people from all walks of life from all over the world and then yelling at all those people from different walks of life for having opinions Mehta modernism places a heavy emphasis on exploring not only our differences but the things that we have in common this is where what I will leveling lovingly call hashtag relatable hashtag content comes from because if their core internet memes are just super condensed storytelling to communicate a universal truth like we all do the thing where you stand in the shower and then you fill your mouth with water and then you spit it out like you're a water fountain it's a feeling of like me too I do that and also most memes that get really popular kind of boiled down to the same format like thing you should be doing thing you should not be doing thing you should be doing things should not be doing what you're gonna do anyway and you know this this one and if you

want to go like really Freudian with it what this is really expressing is this so what I'm saying is that means they're gonna enter the literary canon it's works of high art someday anyway further extrapolating that kind of Mimi thing into a video game narrative is as simple as writing truthfully and authentically I know that sounds kind of obvious but your best writing is going to come from a place of vulnerability and that authenticity will always shine through dream daddy has been pretty widely praised for having a very genuine and heartfelt story and I think so many of the most touching moments in the game came from some deeply vulnerable places for me in my core right or Vernon and we touch on a lot of serious subjects like alcoholism impostor syndrome toxic masculinity etc like by allowing yourself to be vulnerable with players they can connect with you more like for example whoa guys holy [ __ ] my peer I'm doing a talk we had technical difficulties I spent the last hour freaking out I have not had breakfast I

hate public speaking it's really stressful of having a bad time anyway we're back thanks thank you but this is exactly what I'm talking about by choosing to be vulnerable you guys hopefully feel a little bit more connected to me as a person and if you don't then just act like you are I don't know work with me I was vulnerable with you don't take advantage that anyway one of the things we did post announcement were these character introductions which were actually modeled around tag me-me-me's like this this one and if you've never seen one of these before they're typically a bunch of simply drawn characters with these brief descriptions I always end up comparing them to horoscopes like there's these sets of traits that really could be applicable to anybody but the idea is that you tag the one that you're most like and then you also tag your friends and so we did these and following that people really related to these descriptions of the characters and he'd have even if they didn't exactly they tagged their friends who did which is another entry point for new players and so we decided to post a blank

version for people to put their own dead sona's on too because people were sending us so much fan art of them anyway I mean like look at those good boys and what actually ended up happening is that people kind of turned it into a meme it was just this for a very long time we kind of had to like not check the notifications because you guys are some meemers so you can definitely draw inspiration from memes without clumsily shoving them in places where they don't belong and another example of this happen when I got some of the early sketches of Joseph sprite from our wonderful character artist Shannon Pei I had passed off my designs and when she showed me this pose I was like hugs really familiar why does that look so familiar and then I realized oh oh he looks like you know I had to do it to him guy I

should get her to change that and then I thought no I should not because this that creates an opportunity for people to make that connection on their own to speculate whether it was on purpose or not or to just make jokes about it and sure enough we got a ton of tweets like this I'm thrilled this is exactly what I wanted so meta modernism also stresses the understanding of other perspectives which goes hand in hand with inclusivity and diversity and when I was submitting my pitch for a talk I considered doing one about writing inclusivity and then I realized that that talk would be 60 seconds long because all I have to say is just [ __ ] do it right diverse characters represent diverse groups of people and if you're not sure how to write perspectives that are different from your own find someone who does and give them money it's that easy and if you'd like if you've never written a song before and you don't know how to read music and you don't know how to play any instruments and you don't know anything about music theory and

also you've never actually even listened to music before are you going to set out to create the entire soundtrack of your game recorded from scratch in your basement no you're gonna hire someone who knows what they're doing it's the same thing and obviously neither dream daddy's co-creator Vernon Shaw I are gay dads so we were constantly talking to a lot of gay men trans men actual fathers and other members of the LGBT community to get feedback and the game is so much richer for it and I really do not want to hear that writing perspectives that are inclusive is some kind of niche topic that won't make money because if the success of dream daddy is any indication there is a huge demographic of people that is starved for content that represents them I know and these people deserve to feel included and further not only is putting together a diverse cast a wonderful step towards inclusivity it's just more realistic diversity is just good storytelling and also I'm gonna advocate for doing your research I am a huge nerd and I love reading a lot of books and you should

too if you're a writer so like do as much research as you can and keep a running notebook of what you're learning creating a vocabulary of knowledge that you can draw upon as your writing is gonna make your work so much better and when you get stuck on story you can always go back to those notes for inspiration and when we started writing dream daddy I checked out a bunch of books from the library on pretty much anything even tangentially related to the story being a dad being a single dad the cultural ideas wrapped up in patriarchal societies being a gay dad the history of the gay man in America etcetera and we learned so much that we otherwise never would have touched on just read read more read more is my point also if you enjoyed dream daddy or like my brothers husband please read does this baby make me look straight by Dan Bukit in ski because it's fantastic and really funny and it made me cry a lot and obviously we're going to talk about layered identities now the way we present ourselves varies based on who we're talking to the way you tell a story to your parents is probably very different from the way

that you tell a story to your friends and similarly the way that you present yourself on Facebook it's probably very very different from the way that you present yourself on your private vent Twitter don't act like you do not have one I know about the anime ship posting it's okay we're all friends here and one of the cool things about meta modernism is that it encourages us to really explore how we express these different facets of our personalities through not only social media but video games as well I know I'm not the only person in this room who spends an inordinate amount of time on character creators there's a community of people who I think really want more gaming experiences that let them explore themselves and games that can teach them something about who they are or give them an opportunity to explore their sexuality or gender identity when they might not be able to do so in real life and there's no better testament to how underserved this community is than the popularity of Dragon Age and Mass Effect among young women and queer people especially the Phantom's for these games

are vibrant and thriving and most of the fan content revolves around exploring the relationships between the characters and creating work about the players Shepard warden Inquisitor Hawk etc and while these games are of course amazing in their own right I think that the robust character creators combined with very well-written friendships and romantic relationships really encourage this type of extensive engagement beyond playtime because it creates a deeper emotional investment that's so Thursday literally and figuratively trying to play off of this our goal with the writing player dad and designing the character creator was to give people lots of options to customize their dad making sure to include a wide variety of skin tones facial features body types offers to have a trans dad as well as more androgynous and feminine options to choose from and I would include all the tweets from people thanking us for having a character creator that actually represents them but I did not want to start weeping in the middle of this talk

and be unable to continue if you went to Tyler's talk earlier this week to see us both cry that's great you also make some decisions in the first five minutes of the game in regards to the gender of your dead spouse as well as whether Amanda is your biological child or if she was adopted and these choices had very little effect on the rest of the game aside from changing a few variables but they proved to be really meaningful to people and how it dictated their characters past and sexuality excuse me they give you the lapel mic and you can't even lean away it's like you're you're just gonna hear all of it this is Who I am oh no [Applause] and full credit again to dream daddies brilliant director Tyler Hutchison who's sitting right over there at least I hope it's Tyler a bunch of people look the same when the lights are really bright that's you okay and you know it was also this idea for the binder bods and he gave the amazing talk earlier this week

about how you as a straight white dude can take small steps to make a world of difference for players which if you missed please check out on the vault it was wonderful anyway one of the major things that compels people to share things with others on the Internet is whether the content communicates something about the person or their relationships with others so creating an opportunity for players to express themselves especially through a character creator is something that is pretty much guaranteed to be shareable I mean you guys remember when we tono came out and Twitter was just only miitomo for a long time everyone just wants to show everybody else what they look like in cute cartoon form it's it's a it's a universal thing it's what brings us all together we love cartoons and finally we have radical optimism and I like to describe this recent shift over the past couple of years as the progression from the popularity of me IRL memes which are about hating yourself and being depressed these are all fun those are relatable and we went from

this to wholesome memes where you want to support your friends and pet dogs and just be kind and positive and right now I think people are really craving stuff that's silly and fun and uplifting because boy things are kind of dire in the world right now and as you can see from this highly scientific line graph depression memes continue to be popular but wholesome memes are slowly rising up and taking over and this little spike right here that kicks it off is what do you know 2016 election yeah and if you take a look at the kind of content that fan communities create which we can assume is what people really really want out of their stories time and time again for every fandom that I looked up on ao3 what could possibly be more popular than angst [ __ ] and anal sex this is a real thing that I wrote into my talk and I regret it a little bit now anybody want to guess what it is it's fluff and for those who have never read

fanfic and first of all yeah okay sure fluff is just comedic silly sweet fanfic with little to no substance it's like the wholesome equivalent of a lemon or reportin without plot and at this point I think we're all pretty burned out on cynicism in characters who don't talk like real people do and stories that are just grim and gritty for the sake of being grim and gritty and I'm not saying that your game should just be sweet and simple but people seem to respond really strongly to stories about characters who genuinely care about each other and they want the best for each other and when we were writing the game it was also really important to us that none of the humor punched down so to speak we tried really hard to keep everything positive and again inclusive because jokes that punch don't hurt your players and with comedy your jokes are going to create in groups and out groups and by punching down you're tightening the radius of that in-group smaller and smaller and potentially alienating players that

would otherwise really enjoy your game Plus going for the low-hanging fruit is just so done and creatively bankrupt at this point I mean look at Ricky Gervais is just can eat chill can you find some show and by not punching down you're actually gonna force yourself to be even more creative and your writing will be better this mentality also extended into the approach that we took for our social media accounts we always tried to come from a place of positivity and support which ranges from how we responded to fan art to how we responded to angry players reporting bugs it's sort of like when you go to Disney and you ask they can't tell you the parks closes at 8:00 they have to say the park is open until 8:00 so we adopted the voice of a supportive proud dad on Twitter and people responded really well to it and the coolest part that us being positive in turn got the fans to be supportive and kind to each other as well so you really have the power to set the tone of how people interact with both you and other players so now that I've gone over the tour core tenets of meta modernism which are again

sincerity wrapped in cynicism collapsing distances radical optimism and layered identities let's talk about how you can utilize these principles to create a product that's very spreadable so the moment that we see a piece of content on social media before we even consciously aware of it our brain is already making decisions about its share ability a 2011 study by a group of psychologists at UCLA put a bunch of students through an fMRI scan as they were exposed to different pitches for a variety of fake TV shows and instructed to roleplay as interns and to take note of the pitches that they would potentially want to share with producers the psychologists determined that the moment a group of students role-playing as interns were first exposed to an idea that they would ultimately decide to share with the producers this area in the brain called the temporoparietal Junction would light up and it's the area between the temporal and parietal lobes oscillating between two areas of the brain meta modernism so the temporal parietal

Junction is actually a part of the outer layer of the brain called the mentalization Network mentalizing is the process of understanding how other people think and feel and this entire network is engaged when we see something that we might potentially share with others and this is the same part of the brain that theoretically would have been engaged when ancient humans dragged fresh-killed back to their tribe we're deeply wired to want to share things of quality with those that we care about and even though the TPJ is connection with social media is still being pretty extensively researched we can actually use this information to our advantage by looking at the kinds of rapid-fire questions where subconsciously thinking when we see an interesting post on social media namely is this content worth engaging with is it worth sharing what's the best platform to spread it through might it be of interest to specific people does it convey something about Who I am or my relationship with others and does it reflect the values of my community and some questions you want

to ask yourself in your design process to make sure that the answers to all of those questions are resounding yes you want to think about is it portable quotable grabbable is it available when and where audiences want it is it easily reusable in a variety of ways is it relevant to multiple audiences and if so who is it a part of a steady stream of material and because so much of the way people interact with games is now takes place outside of play time and fan communities and on social media encouraging this kind of engagement is essential for ensuring that your game is spreadable and there are a couple of different things that you can do to create a game that leaves room for people to sink their teeth into the work and run with it and with the way this participatory culture works you as a dev need to be okay with relinquish a certain amount of control over your IP think about it like this you hand somebody a finished novel they'll read it and I'll have a good

time sure but what if you handed the same person a Madlib and told them to fill it in and then you hand hundreds of other people the same Madlib and they're all gonna have different ways of filling in the blanks and you know then they're gonna fight each other over how they filled in the blanks but they're gonna be so much more engaged because they get to decide what this story means to them and some things that can create these little Mad Libs gaps for players include tapping into shared fantasies humor parody references an intertextual 'ti unfinished content mystery timely controversy and the dreaded discourse and rumors going in-depth into each of these would be an entire talk in itself but as one example I mean we didn't end each of the dad's date paths essentially at the beginning of a romantic relationship just because we didn't have forever to write a sprawling epic abut dating sim was partially that but by leaving the endings ambiguous and open-ended it created an opportunity for

players to decide for themselves what happens next and his stir spurred a ton of fan art and a man imagines in fan fics and memes and I know that it can be really difficult to relinquish some of that control the giving people room to remix pay homage to and meme elements of your work not only creates a community where everyone feels more invested in a property because they're able to help shape the context of the work but it also creates a network of entry points for people to be exposed to your product traditional marketing and PR avenues are still very important and we definitely did our fair share of spreading press releases but as you can see grassroots rallying from fans casts a much wider net that is not only going to reach a much wider audience but people are so much more likely to be interested in your game when it's being endorsed by someone they know or respect rather than it just being hocked at them by an advertisement because let's face it nobody wants to be marketed to

especially while they're playing a game or just trying to read their friend's hot takes on Facebook and the same demographic that responds positively to the principles of meta modernism consists of a bunch of young people who hate all of the trappings of late-stage capitalism so you kind of need to be tactful about it and marketing should not be your last step it should be R first it should be an ongoing conversation throughout the development process understand who your game is for what that community values and how your game can facilitate subvert or reinforce the conversations people are already having going back to this slide I want to talk about portability because I think that's arguably the most important point on this list a big part of getting an idea to travel on the Internet is by really optimizing its portability this often boils down to nailing your elevator pitch but not the stop at every floor waiting for people to get on an off elevator pitch and honest to god under 30 seconds elevator pitch what is your game about dream daddy co-creator Vernon calls it compressible content

theory the more easily and concisely you can explain an idea the further it will travel on the Internet dream daddy a dad dating simulator is exactly what it says on the tin the dating summer he plays a hot dad and your goal is to mean romance that they're hot dad's well raising your teenage daughter who's about to leave for college someday we'll get to the speed of like side effects for medication and commercials but today it's not that day and even the acronym for the game dee da dee dee s communicates what the game is about and I don't think I'm ever gonna be able to do anything better than the acronym like I can't live up to that I've peaked further when I was designing the characters there were a few guiding principles I tried to keep in mind because fan communities can create so many new entry points for new players it was important to me that the dads could be easily recognizable down to their simplest elements and even recognizable just based on color scheme it was also important to be that I know I loved it it was important to me that all of the

characters could be cheaply and easily cause playable my hoping that you could walk into any thrift store and walk out with most of the items you would need to pull off a decent cosplay and not only is it just an indescribable joy and honor to see so many people's takes on the characters these cosplays also bolster the spread ability of dream daddy and can act as yet another entry point into the games world for the uninitiated and I feel like both of these things are kind of the visual corollary of compressible content theory so the designs are still readable whether it's cosplay really cute chibis dogs or ponies we also tried to create what we called screen kappa below meant moments that we engineered so people would want to post a screen cap to twitter or facebook or tell their friends and a group chat and a lot of these ended up being absurd jokes wholesome stuff relatable content or you know thirst and speaking of thirst I'm

sorry I'm sorry I shouldn't have done that but the end goal with all of these was to have players share a screen grab and for that to get people to ask what is this what is stream daddy and this even applied to our steam page this tumblr post by a random user not affiliated with us at all thank you this person and it was just a screencap of this of the steam page it got 200,000 notes and this sort of thing works really well you just have to be very intentional about it because what all of this boils down to is that when you create a piece of work that aligns with meta modernism and spreadable Theory you're maximizing the share ability of your game it shows that you're not just hearing your community you're actually listening so to round up now that you understand the concepts of meta modernism and spreadability I hope that you could start spotting elements of meta modernism in the media you consume and start incorporating those principles into your work and remember that when

you create content that exists adjacent to the internet without directly referencing it that makes you the most unflagged a of all thank you and if you're interested in reading more about meta modernism spreadability or just checking out some of the sources I mentioned in this talk here's a link where I'm it's just a ton of books websites interviews there's like a shorter version of this talk if you want to share it would be great and you know follow me on all the stuff or don't because it's not great she's really cute and please fill out the speaker evals that you will be receiving because I would love to come back here and just fumble my way through yet another talk but we have early we have a lot of time people ask questions so I can feel less bad about finishing so early there's mics any question hufflepuff what's up

yo um so I was wondering so usually a lot of content for like you know meta modernism stuff is like more appealing towards like Millennials basically I was wondering how how do you work with trying to like relate this to like other people of other generations I suppose that is a really interesting point I think dream daddy is a really extremely targeting Millennials and Gen Z kind of game and that's not something that I've really thought about because the approach that you would need to take to appeal to potentially people who are older would involve different social media because I feel like there's been this mass migration away from things like Facebook for people of a certain age because they're like my grandma's on there like I don't want her to see my anime posts so that's a really good question that I talked to me afterwards and maybe I'll say something more articulate thank you thank you good scarf anybody else wow we're just

getting like non-stop looks here is that a favorite way of skirt oh yeah it totally is it has like the doot-doot skeleton on it it's like yo seriously we're talking memes where's that from we can talk after okay all right I get it you don't to share your spear fashion secrets it's fine what's up when if can any of this backfire constantly and all the time always I think you know knowing to not put memes and your stuff can reduce the possibility of that backfiring because if you look at social media for like any major brand which is really what spurred this talk of like Denny's Twitter Wendy's Twitter like there they're kind of doing okay but I feel like there's only so long that we could get away with doing this before everyone kind of catches on and it's like oh the jig is up I think the thing that you should focus on first is like make a good thing before you try to make a spreadable thing and if it's good I don't know

cream rises and like people will see that it is good yeah there's other people that Mike hi what's up there first oh okay so you have to fight well just to follow up on the Twitter thing I'll go ahead you mentioned you chose a voice for your Twitter and like you made sure to present like as a nice dad your audience responded who was in charge of doing that was the writer involved or did you guys just come over late oh here's a good one this is what we would say it was Vernon and I and we were doing a really great job of you know doing good dad jokes because I don't know I feel like it's really easy to just be like take care of yourselves like I'm your dad and then I guess we went out for cigarettes and never came back because we don't really tweet on the account anymore yeah so that's a loss okay you know yes speaking of the internet and Twitter as soon as I realized that this was not just about embarrassing yourself on your not

embarrassing yourself on the internet oh there was plenty of that and realizing that it was about dream daddy I immediately tweeted at Eric a she saying Anna talk about dream daddy and about how not to embarrass yourself on the interwebs thinking about you Erica you she she said I know that first thing and the key to the second thing is not to feel shame like a normal human being and just go for it and for anybody who doesn't know Erica a she is the voice of the daughter in dream daddy precious Amanda also hey yesterday was the two-year anniversary of when we started working on dads and it was also Amanda's birthday so happy birthday Amanda player last name yay spot for the fictional character thank you yes Erica is wonderful you're gonna read a tweet no just that kind of but yeah okay no I agree with that it's this has probably been the most human talk thank you I did it yeah I

think the same thing is like also if you are terminally online like I am you kind of just have to step away from it a bit and just not listen to the hot takes of like every thirteen-year-old who's like you suck and you should die like it just kind of step back and like go outside sometime so which seems like a very reductive take but sometimes what you you okay I didn't understand 50% of the first few minutes of your talk where you were meaning at me and i genuinely laughed at your dad pun should I just sort of stay away from this trying to do what you've done here well I don't think you have to I think it's it's just the understanding of like I've lost my train of thought I don't know you I don't think you necessarily have to understand memes because the whole point isn't you

know don't try to directly do memes well why didn't I go longer I don't have good answers to questions I'm sorry I'm sorry thank you for your question oh god hi oh the point was don't use memes right what the point was don't use memes right yeah that was it that's what the talk was about yes good talk give me examples of dads that didn't fit this criteria and like were scrapped scrapped dad's ghost ads I think I think I wanted to do like a surfer dad like a real beach bum like just kind of hangs out in the beach house dad but that there would have been like no conflict there cuz I'm just women like hey man like concert and I think there was actually like Brian originally was going to just be like the sweet cinnamon roll dad who was just

nice and then we started writing that really like hmm if someone's just a cinnamon roll there is no such thing as conflict and this game was just not a 130,000 word coffee shop a you so we ended up like I was like oh shoot I really wish that we had a rival dad because I just want like a dad another need to Duke it out and we're like just scrap Brian's path like let's make him the rival dad sure we have the assets we're not changing it we're just gonna rewrite it so Brian was once a very sweet boy and now he's still a sweet boy but beneath the rival exterior cool thanks thank you okay thank you yeah they're brilliant talk so actually the gentleman over there actually brings up a good point so as we as creators age one of the things that I'm I guess fearing is that we're getting further and further away from from exactly from the conversation itself that's happening around the internet so like one of us you know might be using on fleek when we're like 40 still for some reason so

my question is like how exactly do you keep yourself in the conversation as age um hire younger people would be an answer to that one but I know that it can be really difficult and it's also just like following the right people on social media like if you're just following people your age like you really would kind of want like a scattershot right from all age groups because yeah but going back to the other point is just like make sure your thing is good because if you do a thing and it's just like oh I own it and I'm not implying that this is what you're gonna like I just want a hundred thousand retweets like it's not gonna go so hot but yeah just quality quality first and then memes alright but not but not that quality first but also not perfect thank you what he said hello I mean I I just got to this one you could do those guys oh hi hello

I like hit the lights are so bright you guys are just like indistinct blurs so hello blur so with regards to writing and narrative design I was curious about how when you have characters that you're writing and also you have a visual representation and then with voice acting as well delineating like basically how specific you go with each given character as far as you know cuz like as soon as you start voicing a character then that actually kind of closes off what that character can be to a player is that making sense as far as 100% makes sense that's why we did not do fully voiced things because we pretty much just have dad grunts and even that I was like a little nervous about doing because I think so much of like game culture right now happens as a result of Let's Plays and like half the fun of a let's play is seeing what kind of voice the let's players choose to do for the characters and so we just wanted to keep

it like really minimal while still having you know some fun cameos from people that hopefully players would enjoy hearing make a lot of weird death noises did you find that there was a wide disparity on like how people voiced certain dads or was it fairly consistent so like you know um how stressful it is like when you write something then you have to like read it in front of a group of people imagine that but then you look at the view count and it's like 3 million and then yeah okay I can't do this so I've watched maybe like one episode of one let's play so I don't know thank you you were waiting okay so um I haven't played dream daddy but I owe it to both your talks and they're both excellent and now I have to play it I wanted to ask about process I want to ask about research what were the most difficult things to research and how did you take some of the things that you mentioned you talked like couching brain

fart very sincerity within cynicism or within silliness how did that inform your research like you to go what cynical like yeah um I think with writing a comedy game the first thing that we figured out and we were making the big flowcharts of like here's how the narrative works and this happens and this happens like along with figuring out like okay here's the basic character arc one of the first things we nailed down for each character was like what is the emotional core of this story and then just layering lots and lots of jokes on it and just making sure that like it's a gradual path down like if you date Robert who's the bad dad like I mean you guys just run around and like eat pizza in an alley and then he makes a joke about like this is where I come to masturbate and like you Whittle and all that stuff but then like his story gets kind of like dark and sad later so it's just more of like a gradual you got to wade into it I think but with the

research I think the research ties itself to the sincerity because you were finding what the truth and this story is and it was really interesting reading the books like I read one book that was written by like a heterosexual father and then I read that does this baby make me look straight and like does this baby make me look straight isn't sweetest like those are the most thoughtful parents and then reading this straight dad book it's like I'm threatened by my son even though he is eight years old and I've been but my wife's Authority threatens my masculinity it's like I do pull it the [ __ ] together so yeah like it's also just like picking and choosing what works for you and what doesn't because obviously we did not want to have a dad who's like the big man and I don't need to have feelings talks with my children because that threatens my identity yeah thanks thank you we got five minutes all right

thank you first cuz I didn't realize that I needed to see a oh three and a talk until now and it was great I got you yeah and when you build a game for inclusivity and you build your Twitter for any your outreach for inclusivity how what is your mentality when people still feel unincluded like how do you reach out to those people and what's your general approach there there is no such thing as perfect representation but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't strive for it you just kind of have to accept that some people are it's just I wish people could on the internet could learn the phrase this is not for me and that's okay and that that can be a really difficult thing because like you can really try your hardest and like be taking as many steps as possible at every single step of like okay is this in books is this inclusion we have all these consultants and like you can still [ __ ] up real bad and I think another important thing especially in regards to social media is never ever market your game on the

inclusivity don't do it it is the bare minimum not a thing you should get cookies for like and also people will come down on you so hard because it's super transparent of like well we put fat people in this game so give us a pat on the back that's sorry sorry no that's not that's not dick that's not a big thing because that's hysterical yeah okay but yeah just because people like the moment you say that you're inclusive like people are gonna be like well how inclusive is it really and then you will get call out posts but yeah just just do it because it's the right thing to do and it's good storytelling not you know thank you your experience and sharing it was really valuable thank you a hein so I came to the talk thinking that it was about how to work your game out there without being embarrassed but I think

what I understood was the opposite was like being embarrassed he's the way yeah all right yeah my entire brand is just how [ __ ] ready I am to get off of this stage my question you see if I understood your eyes seems like thanks oh yay alright okay nobody no we're done thank you [Applause]