Investing in the Future: Narrative Mentorship

[Music] my name is bobby stein i'm navira king and we're here to tell you a little bit about uh narrative mentorship so um let's get started so before i actually get into the details of the program that we actually piloted last year i'll tell you a little bit about uh the game that we work on and kind of what our studio has been up to the past few years so our primary project that we work on at arena is guild wars 2 it was originally released in 2012 uh currently has a global user base in north america europe and asia and at last public count we had 11 million players um once the game was came out in the fall of 2012 we supported it with post release content that was a blend of two different types of things that we were doing the first thing was living world releases that would come out roughly every few months to support the

live game and these were free releases all you had to do was log in and unlock them and also we had expansions that would be sold for you know 20 or 30 bucks and would have a campaign of a fixed length so between those two released post release strategies we've been able to keep the game uh basically populated and successful for the past six and a half years so the serialized story releases that fall under the living world umbrella actually kind of loosely emulate a television show where we'll have a serialized story that progresses with every release and then we'll have an expansion which roughly equates to something like a film where it's a bit smaller and more focused in between those releases will also support the game with new things and features like raids fractals pvp wealthy world rapid content which is just adding small bits into the game uh microtransaction things like new uh skins and and dies and things like that and

quality of life improvements so in short when we're talking about guild wars as a product it has a very diverse player base because we are a global game we have people who are playing with their kids we have adults retirees my father is a player so yeah we got people in their 70s and 80s who actually play the game as well as kids who are pretty young um it's a global game with a global audience so actually everything on this map represents where we have players if it's filled in with any color there are players there the two darkest regions are the ones with our biggest concentrated player bases fun fact actually in antarctica we have four players so they're very active so all this means uh leads us to the importance of storytelling diversity to reach such a global audience and when we're talking about diversity we're not just talking about you know diverse characters in game or

diverse ways of dialogue and ways of speaking to represent those people we're talking about diversity of teams that will bring about more authentically diverse stories when you have a diverse team and i'm talking about across demos we're talking gender ethnicity sexuality generation neural neurotypicality if that's a word um all of those sorts of buckets that would make up the diverse human population those are the kinds of folks you want to bring to a diverse narrative team the reason is that the more folks you have represented at your table um in your narrative team the more perspectives the more authenticity to those stories and the less fear comes less fear and more checks and balances so there's no way to represent everybody on an ever within a narrative team but when you have more diversity you have folks who have more um they've

encountered different stories there's more likely to be someone who says hey that sounds like appropriation why don't we go check over here and get you know a better feedback on what we're the story we're trying to tell it makes our stories more more authentic and when i when we're talking about diverse stories we're talking about dynamically diverse stories it's the difference between you know we can research anything google internet we can do all those things right we can come up with a story but a personal point of view is much stronger it's the difference between hearing about the civil war with locations of battles and the dates versus a soldier's personal on the field remembrances and how engaging that story can be and that leads us to specificity specificity leads to universality and when i talk about that there's two sides to the audience coin there is the a side the side that's represented on the screen

or in the story it's familiar to them it represents them themselves or it is familiar to them in some way or it's their story the b side is everyone else the others you're not represented on that screen but if the representation is authentic you know even if you're the other on some subliminal level even if you can't articulate you recognize the authenticity the truth in that story and that character and that plot the groundedness of the of the world and of the interactions so when we talk about both sides of that audience coin we're talking about a global hunger right now for diversity and stories and representation new stories new perspectives perfect examples black panther get out crazy rich asians those are all very specific stories told by very specific personality um very specific communities with very specific perspectives but global audiences ate those stories

up regardless if they saw themselves in it or if they were among the others so and also there's a new the new normal is a spectrum of representation within a story perfect example captain marvel so everyone's looking at it's the first female superhero but if you've seen the movie there are many women many diverse people of color mixed in and no one's like hey you know here's this other person and it's not called attention attention's not called to it but it's strong and it gives a stronger story and an audience that's more engaged this hunger leads to audience engagement engaged happy players equal profit that's in case you need a business case for you know why diverse staffing is important there you go so the whole concept of uh mentorship as it was kind of developed on on our team was basically

we were confronted with a problem we had uh at the beginning of last year a couple of vacancies in the narrative department we were looking for a couple of writer narrative designers and when we opened up the job position and we started getting applications we started realizing that um we were seeing a lot of the same people applying for the job repeatedly that's great i mean just because someone didn't uh get a job the first time they applied doesn't mean that they're not qualified it might just mean that what we were looking for specifically they didn't have or there was someone more appropriate for the role but we did started realizing that we had a lot of the same applicants over and over again and we weren't really seeing a lot of new people come through the pipeline for review we also started realizing that after talking to some folks about the position we realized that they were interested in the job but they didn't bother applying because when they looked at the job requirements they felt that because

they didn't meet every single bullet point uh that they would have no chance and therefore they didn't bother applying so they were sort of self-selecting themselves out of the candidate pool um and also because those those job requirements were a bit heavy we were asking for people who had experience in television and then also in other media like comics or novelizations or pen and paper there was a bit of a barrier to entry we were getting some people who were applying who had really great portfolios and samples but because they lacked the years on the job that we were looking for we were actually hiring for a mid-level position that they just decided not to bother so these promising candidates we realized that we were discouraging them and we needed to do to do something about it so uh at the end of the review cycle we

figured let's let's take a look at this and figure out if there's a better way to do it so we figured that mentorship might actually be a good solution to the problem so if we could provide a road map to the candidates who were promising but maybe not quite ready for the job we could maybe help prepare them not only for a job with us but really for a job at any studio in the industry we felt that getting more people into the mix would ultimately benefit the industry as a whole we would offer support to those folks and also basically make ourselves available uh whether it was during work hours for certain sessions but or just make ourselves available to answer emails if they had questions about any particular thing lastly we wanted the mentorship program to be self-directed not everybody coming in was going to be looking for the same thing and rather than try and manage every

person trying to come through the program we felt that it would be better if we put that responsibility on them so now that we decided that we wanted to use mentorship as a way for people to kind of get over that hurdle whether it's to get their first job or just to kind of leverage their own experiences into a new career path we needed to figure out who we were going to invite to participate so uh we we set out a couple of guidelines and they were very simple we were actually going to open the mentorship program into anybody so anybody could apply or express interest but we wanted to also focus on folks who needed a little bit of extra help getting over that hurdle for the first job so we were looking for people whose voices were underrepresented in in game narrative uh those who were experiencing financial hardships didn't have the means to necessarily get the education that uh is often required for these jobs and folks who show uh strength of character like veterans

and folks involved in public service to sort of summarize that everyone who is when we say underrepresented voices we really mean not white not male hetero cis male heterosexual that little bucket so um investing in those future storytellers and bringing them to the table is not just about hiring an arena net like bobby said it's also about also about elevating the industry as a whole the more really strong storytellers we have out there in games the better stories we'll have in games the more engaged people will be in what we're creating so now that we had decided to start the program we needed to reach out to folks uh the first thing that we did is actually uh get back in touch with folks who had uh who had applied for the position with us but uh didn't quite make the cut we scheduled conference calls with them kind of explained to them why we felt they weren't quite ready for a job with us but

we then extended the offer to have them participate in the mentorship program we also polled our professional network we started asking narrative folk at other companies and asking if they knew of anyone through their network who they could recommend and lastly we reached out on social media if there was anybody who's don't know conduct and candor and thoughts about narrative design and writing uh we felt were interesting or promising we would reach out to them and try and uh get to know them a little bit better so i was one of these people who was looking to break into uh narrative uh design and writing for games a little secret i'm older than i might look and so when i was in undergrad there weren't any creative narrative game development tracks um it just wasn't anything that folks were thinking about like maybe if you

were in compute commuter computer engineering it was something for you but from a creative writing perspective it just wasn't there from a storytelling perspective i was a film student my first career was as a creative producer and writer and variety tv and video i had a few years prior to looking to move into games where i was working as a developing content for mixed reality but i didn't have any traditional game experience game writing experience i had uncredited writing chops and that production creative team experience but it really wasn't sure how to make the transition there's no clear road map everybody says a little bit different you know gives you a little bit different type of advice for how to break in but it's very difficult if you're on the outside to figure out what that track is what skills that i had which which skills were applicable i didn't know because every single studio has a different posting for what

it is to be a writer a writer narrative designer a narrative designer everybody's terms are different i couldn't figure out you know when everybody says you know change your resume to reflect this particular job posting well what in my varied freelance career of more than a decade could be applied for what i was what i was trying to get into let's be honest studios and narrative departments and recruiters when they're posting something and trying to fill a spot on their team they don't have time to walk applicants through how to showcase what your skills are and how to tell tell them that you really should be on their team so i didn't know what i didn't know right i'm a storyteller but the games industry that landscape was really foreign to me and i needed a map i was doing informational interviews but

i really wished for the sort of invaluable resource of hands-on training field apprenticeship if you will i needed honest feedback and quality attention from folks who are already in it so now that we were committed to doing the program and we had actually reached out to folks we wanted to actually have a plan of what to do once they showed up so we decided to focus on three major areas that we felt would be most useful to mentees who were trying to market themselves but then also to us as a team looking to grow basically if we could foster somebody's career development what would we want to advise them on so we've broken into three categories screenwriting you know just basically writing uh screenplays or teleplays to adapted for games narrative design basically getting people to understand

that they are writing not just for uh linear media that you know we have concepts of things like branching that we often will be partnered with game designers and artists um and programmers to represent the story in outside of scenes and cinematics but also through gameplay and lastly career development a lot of schools don't really give you much coaching when it comes to how to be a good collaborative partner on the job so we felt that if there was anything that we could do to give people tips and a little bit of direction on on how to present themselves in interviews and also once they were on the job how to basically be good partners in development basically to be good um advocates for story but then also to respect uh partners in adjacent disciplines so the structure was we would meet

once per week every wednesday uh the mentees would come in we would play the game together for about an hour uh at which point you know various members of staff would answer any questions if people were new to the game that we were making but then after that session was over we would spend the next couple of hours doing a variety of things some days it would be just a question and answer session if people had something that they wanted to learn more about we would do lectures or give presentations on various aspects of screenwriting or narrative design we'd also give feedback either on the scripts that people want to show us or on some projects that they were working on lastly we would periodically give assignments so at the end of a presentation covering a particular topic we would ask them to come back for the following week and maybe dissect a narrative moment or gameplay moment from something that they had been playing and kind of break it apart and do its components and talk about if they were to re-engineer it or if a

game director came to them and said okay listen we need to change the sequence let's not use a cinematic but do this through gameplay like what ideas could they bring to the table so that we could get them thinking critically about story delivery in games beyond just the script itself here's a picture of a couple mentees and some of the guys who work at arenanet game designers this is really to show it was a very casual environment a lot of times and that that fostered that sort of relationship and give and take and asking questions and also just dialogue which is very important and also very rare when you're trying to break in yeah this is actually a photo from a mock um i'll get to that oh yeah sorry that's coming up um so the end goal that we wanted to was to provide career guidance for the mentee um

give them advice uh and help with their portfolio development you know if they came to us with a portfolio we'd give them feedback on how to strengthen it and a lot of that would come based on what jobs they were actually looking to get um someone's portfolio might look different if they were going for a pure narrative design job versus a pure writing job so we wanted to kind of educate them on the differences so that they could scale their samples accordingly and also just provide ongoing uh support as they needed it so my experience coming in as i mentioned i had i've been doing informational interviews and sort of mining my network as much as possible to try to figure out you know who to talk to and who's already doing the job or something above the job that i really wanted to do and through that i was introduced to tom abernathy who's our studio narrative director and bobby one of the first things that they asked me for once they told me about the program was a couple of writing samples preferably a teleplay if i had one but

something you know that i thought represented my range and my abilities so that they could kind of see where i was at in addition uh bobby sent me a self-assessment to fill out and the beauty of this is that it got us on the same page i was able to say here are what i believe my strengths are what i feel very comfortable in and here are the weaknesses that i know that i have even in general in terms of those three buckets screenwriting narrative design and career development so for me it set the tone and set expectations for what this program was going to provide it also set the feeling of a safe space to not know i think a lot of people in underrepresented groups folks don't understand is that they always feel that you need to put your very very very best foot forward like i know i'll fake it till i make it you know what i mean like and so when you do that

yes you can it'll help you get in sometimes but it also doesn't in a mentorship program where you're supposed to be learning and taking um taking away all of the benefits being comfortable and saying i just don't know about this is really important so setting that tone from the outside was great for me personally i was missing that game development narrative design side i had the screen i had some screenwriting even though it was nice to get more honest feedback on how i was doing and i wasn't green in terms of my professional career the other thing was that i came into the program several weeks behind the other mentees i mentioned this because it speaks to the agility of a program like this that i was able to jump in and still get a lot out of it it was about the quality of the time that i spent with bobby and armond constantine our narrative design lead and a couple of other people it was it was about the quantity of the

quality of time not the quantity of time so one of the things when i first started i did the narrative design lectures like bobby was mentioning he had some one-on-ones with me to catch me up on the lectures he'd given the nice thing about this is that they were structured but they were also very organic so if there was something that i was like okay i get you know x y but z over here let's dig into that give me more examples let me ask more questions let me really deep dive i did the group sessions with other mentees the great thing about that is that if you have a diverse group of mentees at different walks of life career life they're going to bring different uh points to the table and ask different questions and the dialogue will be a lot richer so instead of having a bunch of you know having my cohort be everyone just like me it was much nicer to have that diversity within the group as well um we did things like i

broke story for my uh my uh we were pitching you know an episode of guild wars 2. and so i got to break a story for that for the one that i really wanted to do with our narrative design lead i got to pitch it i have a pitch session with a contingent of the narrative design team and it was real it was like let's poke some holes in this how would we fix this it was a session like i would have gotten if i had been staff already i had a collaborative time one-on-one with one of the game designers you saw that photo with several game designers but first we were paired off with a game designer as if we were the two working on an episode and we worked through what would the player experience be all the things the questions that are going to come from a game designer that a writer is not necessarily going to be thinking of if my if your background's just writing it it gave me that give and take that i wouldn't have gotten from a book um so that and and then we had in addition to being paired with that

game designer we had one of the uh game designers pretend to be the game director and he showed up and like was like well now let me throw some you know monkeys into the wrench wrenches into the monkey whatever i'm making words up i'm a writer so the three things that really come out of that is that you get honest feedback that is invaluable to someone looking to break in you're getting real-world scenarios and you're being challenged and those challenges highlighted for me which skills i had in my backpack that i could utilize and where my weaknesses were and what i needed to learn and really double down on so you know bobby mentioned support earlier support is a resource support is a resource that many underrepresented groups that we mentioned they lack support and encouragement gave me the confidence and the authority to bring my talents to the table

more empowered voices are going to elevate our industry as a whole in narrative so how'd it go all right i'll tell you so the program actually went for roughly six months it sort of formed organically and we started looking at creating it in january but it really didn't get uh going until about february lasted roughly six months until july we had six total participants who came in at various stages um about half of them made it through the entire time or basically performed what we figured was completing the major assignment which was uh pitching an episode coming up with an outline working with a designer on what the narrative design would be and then um doing a draft of the script of the golden path um and we made one higher at the end we just our success story

you know all the all the mentees who participated were great and definitely brought really wonderful experiences to the program and hopefully walked away with them but novira i think from her work in television and also in what was it ar and vr development it was able to pick up on a lot of these things pretty quickly so she was guys [Laughter] moving on so what next so we actually think that the program was a success even though only half of uh the participants actually made it through to the end so what we want to do is learn from our experiences and try and revise it and try it again so the first thing that we actually did was uh we looked inward and we started doing an internal version of the program so if there were folks who were already

working at the company in either in adjacent disciplines or just elsewhere in the company but not a narrative we would encourage them to come to these sessions sometimes they had the uh desire or expectation or goal of actually moving into narrative at some point and others just actually wanted to be to understand more about the discipline so that if we were partnered together it would be a much smoother process we had a lot of game designers who actually would come learn a lot more about breaking story for serialized or episodic uh content and basically kind of involved them in things so that they would learn more about our discipline and the great side effect is we would learn more about their discipline so we would end up being better partners with each other and we also decided to add networking to the career development a lot of times people either are naturally good networkers or they're not we figured that since it was so important for people's uh

you know employment future future forward um especially in games yeah exactly a lot of times people will get work through the people who they know so we decided to add that in um we also wanted to make sure that we were supporting people outside the group sessions so we did group sessions only because we didn't have enough people who could dedicate one-on-one time to everybody who wanted to participate uh and when when we actually brought the program in internally there were it was even more uh lopsided basically we only had a few people who were able to dedicate any of their time to the program and a lot of people interested so we would typically have uh conversations where it was myself and maybe one other person from the narrative team and like 15 people from adjacent disciplines showing up so there's just no way we can devote a significant amount of time to everybody but outside of those sessions if people had 15 minutes or a half hour to just talk uh or if they just sent us a link hey

listen i wrote this would you mind giving me some feedback well then if we had free time in our day we would you know look at that and give them a little bit of our time another thing sorry you know go ahead another thing we're going to be doing is partnering with outside studios so calling back to what i said about how every studio does narrative design and writing differently exposing mentees to a range of positions and mentorship will actually again help them become better candidates and elevate the industry yeah so if actually you are working at a studio and you're interested in learning more about our experiences or developing a program for yourself or if you're in the seattle area and you want to partner with us one of the things we had talked about is maybe mentees spending a few days at our studio and then maybe going to a different studio to see how the writer narrative designer job is different from place to place and a lot of that will be dependent on the project of the job but we feel that it could be a very good

opportunity for people to kind of broaden their horizons so thank you for uh coming and we'd like to give a special thanks to the folks listed uh over here they either participated in the program or they helped us develop it uh and without their help we wouldn't be up here today so special thanks to them and if you would like to contact us outside of this there's our information so thank you very much thanks [Applause] if we don't have to vacate this room so if you do have questions we have a few more minutes yeah it's a chat no questions any questions and if you know you're shy we could always talk about it out in the hall don't be shy you won't bite i promise hi so i guess i am a more general uh designer that's not actually working in narrative at the moment but i would like to be

um my studio doesn't offer as many opportunities to do that um what are things that i should be doing to you know be able to work more towards that direction sure okay so you're a game designer and you're interested in learning more about narrative so to open up career opportunities and also uh partner with narrative is that correct yes sure uh well um one of the things that i would recommend um i mean there's a lot of ways you could do it right um i think probably talking to some folks and networking would be a good place to start because depending on uh specifically what you're looking to learn um it it might actually you might get different advice depending on who you're talking to um there are a few books we can recommend like i guess i guess my question is are you looking at developing like serialized story or something that's very cinematic in nature or are you looking at something that's more like gameplay focused uh probably more gameplay focused okay

um let's talk uh after this because i'd like to learn a little bit more about your situation but i think probably the easiest take sorry the simplest takeaway from this is talk to some people who might work at studios with projects that i might align with what you're looking to learn and we could probably get you paired up with somebody who might be able to uh shed a little bit more light on that i know some people who are a bit more systems focused in narrative versus other people who are a little bit more screenwriting focused and depending on what you're looking for we can make a different recommendation for you all right thank you you're welcome go ahead you were hi thanks for this talk i have the obvious question if i or someone i know would be interested in participating in the next round of the mentorship program what would be the appropriate channel to get involved in that okay so you're asking if you want to participate in our mentorship program how you would go about that okay uh so the initial plan was to

actually have an application process ready to go today so that we could announce it it would have been grand been happy and unfortunately we did not so that didn't come together so i can't point you to a website to apply um but what i'm hoping to do is once we finish the internal mentorship program that we're running right now start up another external one and what we would likely do is post it on the same website where we would post our jobs and it would just be the reason we would do it that way is just because we already have an established system for for fielding applications and then this way people could submit uh not only you know their resume or cover letter and by the way it for for something like this it's very important that you have a cover letter because just seeing the things that you've done doesn't really tell us anything about who you are um we really want to know what a little bit more about you and your outlook on narrative but then also what you're looking for um we would also want to look at a portfolio so that we could uh kind of

gauge what your strengths were and then if there were if it was a good match then we could continue the conversations i would also say yes uh following bobby on twitter is a really good way to find out about any anything that we're doing in terms of mentorship or job openings in narrative um you're really good at sharing that information and also free advice like constantly so i'm just gonna throw that out this might not be good advice but it is free so thank you for what it's worth excellent thank you thank you hey guys great chad um i'm blair leggett with one more story games and and the question i have for you guys is the kind of technology you're using for to assess these these candidates or work with them or iterate through that were you using particularly in-house tools with arena net was it paper mock-ups or oh sure maybe twine or something else like that what uh how did you find that and how effective that was okay cool so you're you're asking if there were any tools or processes that we were using in

the mentorship program to help uh with the coaching process yeah correct okay so there's a lot of paper to be honest um there were some things like uh showing us what the narrative design docs looked like internally that bobby would often put up on a screen and and but because every studio might have different tools the sessions weren't about learning that set of tools it was more about you know these are some of the things that you might need to think about or depending on your studio might need to learn you'll have to learn a tool etc so um it was the paper it works a lot better especially and conversations about about what is in your narrative design what's supposed to happen next what is the game play and just kind of right walking through it that way and just even being able to assess it because i mean sometimes you can have something on paper which can be very effective but as a review tool that doesn't always necessarily work so just wondering what you found with that

yeah so we um i mean internally when when we're developing an episode we'll use a combination of like off-the-shelf stuff and then proprietary things right but like so for example when when the writers are writing a draft of the script they're usually going to do it in final draft or they might do something in word but we have a template that we use in word that emulates a screenplay format so that's usually a good quick way to write a golden path for review as far as what we would expect from a narrative design document we have kind of a loose template that we would share with people and just say hey try and give us something that looks roughly like this and really it was more about we need to see this kind of information being conveyed and often what happened was we would get documents that were overly detailed in the wrong spots so we would ask them to start very high level summarize things use log lines you know get good with an elevator pitch because when you're pitching an idea to a game director or narrative director the last thing you want to do is overwhelm them with detail you really

need to keep it very simple so that was kind of the overriding message that we were trying to impart i would also say that the game designers at arenanet are surprisingly narrative savvy so if it's this would this would go back to our idea of partnering with other studios if it's a studio where they where the tool is important to learn that's something that mentees should be exposed to as well yeah thank you thanks when we talk about inclusion especially in game narrative we always talk about culture and age and gender but what about language is that still a big barrier not to be a native english speaker i don't know if it's i would say that anything that is outside of normal is always something of a barrier right i would also say that the inclusion of of localization and

if you have a global audience how we're localizing an english script for guild wars 2 we're constantly talking to our german translation team and our folks who are doing chinese and are folks who are doing spanish and trying to see if this does this concept translate so i would say that there is something extraordinarily beneficial about having someone on a narrative team who is not a native english speaker english is their second or third or fourth language the way that you think the way that you come at story is really impacted by your first language as well so i would highlight it as a pro not a con yeah we have um i think we localize in five and actually i think folks who come up through localization and move over to narrative i think that's probably a pretty good training ground because the way that we work with our localization team their in-house and what we started doing is including them in table reads we

started writing up episode summaries and giving it to them character bios things like that because what we found was it would cut down on the the questions that they would ask us later in development or when they would go to the studio and record in other languages if they were involved in the story development earlier it just meant that they were more connected to it and i think if yeah if your goal is ultimately to tell stories even if english isn't your first language but you're a competent writer i think that could work to your advantage depending on the scenario absolutely novera you had to come in to handle an established ip how did you prepare for this or if it was covered during the mentorship what did you learn so because i was coming in so many weeks late i doubled down on the research the beauty of guild wars 2 is that the fans have put together a wiki that is ridiculous so i spent like

i don't know like 36 consecutive hours something i like really i was like okay i'm gonna be up i'm just gonna read about all the things and sort of got a feeling for the game and also for the characters and the types of stories that i could tell but because it was going to be a spec script that was never actually going to be in the game there was a bit of leeway what we were really trying to do is get to the point where it was a cohesive strong game story so i could use research to give myself enough of the landscape of the world and then populate it with a bunch of original characters cool thank you i have three questions uh firstly did you do this with the support of your company and how was that for you either way um are you the only mentorship program at the company or are there disciplines involved in this and then have you given any thought to how a remote based mentorship program would work sure those are all great questions so

um i may i may ask for a reminder i got like a goldfish memory so apologies um let's see so the first question was did we have support did we have support um yes i had kind of the blessing in as much as i just went and did it um i my boss was supportive of it and a lot of people said oh that sounds neat and then that was about it so um i kind of just kept pushing on it um and thankfully i think we were you know at that time fully staffed to where i could actually dedicate a few hours every week to developing the program i mean i'm i don't come from a teaching background uh so even though this you know is not a school it's not meant to emulate a classroom i definitely wanted to look at educational course planning as kind of a starting point so yeah as long as this didn't get in the way of my regular work nobody bothered me about it and i think once people started seeing the value of it

they started getting uh more supportive in that sometimes people would actually start volunteering to help they would come to some sessions and and like novira was saying before when it came time to partnering with game designers to kind of simulate the pitch process or the narrative design process or the story breaking process we actually had other professionals in adjacent disciplines who were helping us with it currently i don't believe there is another mentorship program in our building uh i have been approached by people in a couple of different departments like in design and in programming so there is definitely interest but it is up to the leads or directors and those departments to develop them but i wouldn't be surprised if more of the department started doing it because i think they they've seen enough benefit to feel like it's worth uh it's worth it's a worthwhile endeavor um and lastly i guess the question was a base remote yeah that's actually something we've thought about

a bit um we didn't do it for the first class only because we felt that it was hard enough just to get a program going that trying to also juggle remote was going to be an additional like layer of challenge to it um totally open to it and i think we probably would have to do you know if not a fully remote program but at least accommodate for people who are not uh on site so we're we're looking into it we just haven't really done much with that yet and i do think that if we can grow programs like this and partner with other companies that it's good there's going to come a time where you know when we're partnering with other companies if one of the companies is in seattle and some of the mentees are in seattle and then they have remote uh you know in la or vice versa or something like that i think it's a natural and very organic progression for a program like this to become remote but not yet soon soon that's a threat hi hi uh i just have a quick question when

it comes to portfolio pieces and examples um have applied to a lot of different places and one of the some ask for pros examples some ask for screenwriting examples although just in your opinion which is kind of the the better sample to have is screenwriting or prose so the answer to that question will will depend on what company you're applying to and what game they're making the reason that i clarify it that way is we always like to see teleplays like i personally like to see a teleplay because they're a fixed length usually you know i like to see something that's like hey this is a spec episode for 30 minute show it's gonna be 20 23 to 30 pages right so i can probably get through that in a half hour 45 minutes and i i can see somebody's thought process in terms of setting up and paying off a story they'll break it into three acts you know it's very structured and i can get a good sense of what a person's uh

chops are right um sure we'll read longer samples i'll read screenplays and sometimes people will send you know excerpts from their books but but there's no way i'm going to read like a 300 page novel and even if i only just read a section of it unless that section actually was an entire act i'm not going to get what i need to see out of it um some companies may really be looking for that though right that's why i don't tell anybody oh don't do this or don't do that or make sure you have a an excel spreadsheet with barks in it or something like it's going to be very different so i think what's important and this actually falls on the employers who are looking for people they should clarify what they're looking for what we one thing that i realized after the last time we had a job posting was we were kind of opaque about what we were looking for and it wasn't until we would request samples that we might be a little more specific you know we should just put it on the the job description to be like we would like to see this of this length you know and it doesn't have to be something

like for us we don't need to see something in the guild wars universe in fact i'd prefer to not see that because i just want to get a sense of your storytelling uh techniques and a lot of people when they are applying uh for a job at a studio that does a fantasy game they get all fake spear on you and they're sending this thing in that is just kind of really hard to read and not at all what we're looking for so um find out what uh the studio is looking for either try and write something toward a game that they already know they've developed or just ask and say hey listen i can write something up for you or i have samples in a variety of genres what would you like to see and then tailor it for them because you're probably not going to send the same batch of content to every company and it's better to to give them what they want than to guess yeah i'm going to speak a little bit to that because my portfolio was kind of like i don't know no i don't want to say a hot mess but there was a lot of stuff in there and every uh informational interview i was having they were saying something different about what they would like to see i

heard twine do a twine i heard you know tell a play say that you finished your novel you know all of these kinds of things so my advice would be instead of posting your uh portfolio with all of your different kinds of samples have you know a bucket of a few different things that you've done that you're proud of so that to bobby's point when you find out what they what that particular job posting wants you can pull out the best samples and and show it to them because every single group is a little bit different thank you thank you thank you guys yeah thank you um you gotta make up for the people who aren't here come on right right get rowdy this is the party um i'm gonna be participating in a mentorship thing this week um i don't know who actually sponsors it i don't know if it's igda or something but i was asked to participate in some q a sessions so if you look i believe

there are some sign ups still left i think there's like wednesday thursday and friday in the afternoon like four to five or two to three or something like that so if you're interested in attending and asking more questions that's fine or you can just hit me up on uh twitter or you know linkedin or whatnot but anyway thank you so much for thanks for staying guys [Applause]