Panel: The Return of Interactive Fiction PG Connects Digital #2

um is our panel on the return of interactive fiction so now instead of me just chiming in between talks you're stuck with me as the moderator so hi i'm kate edwards i'm the executive director of the global game jam i'm also the ceo of company geography that does game culturalization and i am proud to be a part of this panel and to introduce the panelists who are going to do most of the talking so we have guy gadny from charisma dot ai um carolina corporal from 10th muse um hussein um from honored and then finally jeff vanden oden from totalmayhem games so uh please welcome the panelists

hi everyone hi everybody so great i'm glad to have you all here um so yeah let's let's just start off so i mean we we're talking about interactive fiction which i think for some people might uh you know that that phrase interactive fiction kind of brings setback memories at least for those of us who are old enough you know ancient memories of zork and infidel and hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy and all these fun tech space games that we did way back when um but of course it doesn't it's not limited to that at all i mean interactive fiction today has you know become pretty much everything we know about games and is it intertwined throughout all kinds of different game types today so um so what we're going to start off with is let's just kind of address a fundamental question so um you know i know that like when i've often given lectures that i've asserted that every game has some form of narrative there's something in there um even something like angry birds has

sort of does have a narrative that's built into that game so do you think that every game actually has a story to tell or does all it need is just a good set of game mechanics so if the gameplay is good it really doesn't matter if it has a story well maybe i could go first if it's fine um so i what i what i've worked with most when i worked with games is actually um sandbox simulation which is kind of an interesting genre in the in the storytelling sense because it rarely has a story written into the game but it's an emerging story so that it still it happens when the user is there i i personally really enjoy like games that have a strong narrative element like i enjoy books and and movies but but there's something really unique in the in the in games in the sense that if you just give mechanics to the to the player

they will make up a story in their mind anyway i i do believe that you know it's it's really strong to if you find a balance as a game maker between what you're what you're doing with the narrative and what you're doing gameplay-wise it has to precisely fit the game that you're making so when people have no clue what the game is about you forgot the narrative if they're watching cutscene after cut scene after cut scene and they're like come on just give me the game then you did it too much and and finding that exact balance every game hasn't has a story has a narrative but finding the exact balance that's key to what you're doing with the game yeah and i've i think there's another interesting thing that that the games industry is so broad now that to try and make a generalization uh is is almost impossible it's almost like saying sort of what is the or what what is an ideal story for movie

what's an ideal story for a book can you get a story into a game it's that the breadth uh is now so broad that it's difficult to to generalize i mean again i tend to enjoy a good narrative in the game i enjoy that that's why we do what we do um but i find as jeff said that that interplay is that balance is um and making it right and making it integrated so that the player is is having a seamless experience um that's the art you know i was i think i agree with with what everyone's saying i think i think the only thing i was gonna i think is largely context driven as well right so um to guys point there's so many games now if i'm playing a hyper casual game while waiting for the boss for example i'm not that interested in a narrative i'm more interested in the mechanic but if i'm sitting down to play something on console then yeah narrative is something that keeps me coming back and drives the experience forward so

i think i think context is definitely one of the things to consider in terms of what what and where your where your play is going to be when they're experiencing what you make that's great well you know given that interactive fiction was responsible for drawing a lot of people into games like back in the 70s and 80s and a lot of that was of course because the graphics capabilities back then pretty much sucked and so you know we basically had to focus on doing text based narrative um because that was really kind of the medium at the time but then you fast forward to now and we're seeing this we're seeing quite a resurgence in interest in player bases in the fictional part in having good story good plots uh and so on and so do you think um what do you think are some of the factors driving that interest where it's you know we kind of went through this period of where story what really really mattered was quarter the gameplay then we kind of went through a lot of more into like i guess arcade

style stuff where it's like it's about the game mechanic and much less about the the narrative and now we've kind of shifted back it seems to a certain degree so what do you think is is a part of that well i'll i'll just chime in i mean i think game design is really hard you know it's a it's an art and it's challenging to do writing a good story is really hard trying to do both at the same time is really really hard and i think in some ways you know we we need to cut ourselves some slack that a lot of ways that you know you'd look at the timeline on cape that you're putting there we're a really young industry and to to evolve and mature how to tell our stories in this way does take time it takes time to get you know to work out what we can do with the tool sets that we have so i think there is a there is always you know we are genetically programmed as humans to enjoy stories you know uh that's just the way we always we always are and um and so it's natural

that we should we should warm to a good story when when it's there the flip side is that we turn off when there's a bad story uh so i think i think you know what we're seeing is we're seeing this really beautiful maturation of the industry that can now handle both of them together and the rules the rules are starting to evolve where we are no longer doing the traditional technique of a new medium where it just does what the old medium did but you know puts it into whatever the new form is um we're now really starting to play with the bit that interests me more than anything is how do you get the emotions out there so it's not a narrative that is a and then they went forward and then they went forward again and then they went forward again it's something that properly makes uh makes you laugh makes you makes you cry and and hooks you in in into the story and so i think we're we're with we're just getting we're sort of hitting

our teenage years you know i think i think building on what guy said i think definitely what we see and um might apply across platforms but i think another one is just the emergence of more people who are playing games who wouldn't consider themselves to be gamers so definitely on mobile interactive fiction a large portion of that audience is female like certainly some people on red like 85 of our audience is female um and they wouldn't consider themselves gamers but um they love a narrative story and that's something that's working well so i think new audiences coming into gaming as well will help to drive those behaviors as well and develop new ways to tell stories that they might be normally finding on tv um that they now expect games to deliver in a sense as well yeah i i'd also kind of add to that that um what we're doing at 10th muse is also that we're making it's it's technically this playing it is a game but we're not calling it

the game because uh like you said shiv this audience doesn't doesn't consider themselves as gamers they might not buy a game because they are not like well i don't play they they want to experience something else and interactive fiction is kind of in between of gaming and entertainment so it might might kind of be the the gateway to to playing something also in the future but also it's it's not scary for this audience they they understand it when we tell them like this is a story you get to decide things like who do you want to marry uh does the main character go with the blonde vampire or the the dark hand one so it's they're not even like thinking about is this a game or not they're just like well i want the blonde one and then they click it and that's that's it also believe that you know times are changing and you see that consumers behavior change now that we have netflix and streaming services that gives us series not so much as films but series

these are much more popular than they were ever before people are used to have a narrative with what they wouldn't spend their time in they want to shut shut down from the real world and emerge in this world that they know and have a story leading them through that so i think that that's also a factor of this time that consumers invest more in stories invest more in series and characters and they also find that in computer games and just what caroline said you know we can deliver interactive stories so you can decide things and that is something that you can't easily do within netflix or anything so that's something that games can add to that so i mean so based on your answers i mean would you agree then that basically you know when you employ a story or employ some kind of narrative that is that definitely helps immersion um it helps the player immersion into the experience the overall experience

not just the story obviously but also the gameplay itself um so would you agree with that i mean basically if you if you know kind of going back to what guy said as well as human beings we respond really well to stories so basically is it as simple as like you know f equals m a in physics or like you know you just add story and and players it'll enhance the player experience and they'll enjoy it more it's a bit like i think it's a bit like adding a chili pepper you know if you if you add the right amount of chili it's going to make a really nice meal but if you overload it or add it to ice cream uh you're you know arguably that's not going to be the right solution and picking up briefly on the netflix thing i mean you know we so we've we've done we just came off the back of an interactive drama video drama we'd produced for sky right which was off the back of itself off band of snatch and and all of those and and you look and we've been looking a lot at the kimi schmidt one that

netflix has just done as well and there are elements in that which work and there are elements in that which do not work and that and and it's it's to do with the way that the story is told and the layering of interactivity so again i think it goes back to what i'm saying which is that this is not easy but you ha but but you know we we sort of we have to get it right because um you know we have a maxim a charisma which is one of our staff members said which is you always want to be one step ahead of the player's imagination you don't need to build an entire universe but if you step behind that if they if suddenly that wall breaks and the player you know overtakes it goes through the wall when they shouldn't or gets hit in a cul-de-sac then you've lost them so it's a it's a fine balance i think and it's it's still down to how you do it it's not just you can't just add it and expect for success yeah i i'd maybe add on uh on now that you

went mentioned bandersnatch the the netflix black mirror choose your own adventure type of a film it for me that was a really interesting experience in a way that because usually when i watch tv i'm the passive person just watching but with panda snatch uh bringing me to be part of the story when i i was actually a character in it like making the choices and it actually made me feel bad that i made bad choices for them for the main character so it like never has this happened in uh in any kind of tv entertainment before while as in games it's i know myself like if if it seems i want to get rid of one of the kids uh i feel so bad afterwards so it's it's really it's it's it's making the experience way more intense um in in some ways i i'm not yet sure like

how can that be measured and what what it actually is but it it really makes a big difference i was i was getting up to that i guess how we think of it as well is almost thinking of a storytelling is like the ultimate game loop right so if you design it right it's going to keep people coming back and because it's a really long loop if you've done it really well people want to get all the way through to the end and i think that's the beauty that we have this something like netflix where you can't really iterate a movie live whereas with games we have so much data now we can a b test things and you can literally see event by event when people drop out and maybe change your story and optimize it so i think there's something interesting in thinking of storytelling as a game loop as well that becomes really powerful when you apply to all the technologies that we have available i think that's very interesting what you say ship because one of the things you know uh i see a lot of games still uh not really getting how they

could use narrative for the benefit or for immersion and then you see that you know part two or part three of the game is kind of like the same and it's not really bad if you have a strong game mechanic and use it over and over and over again but you can have players come back for the story you can then have come back for exactly if you know from your data what what was really great what what did people really like um and then make sure that you have a story to draw them back in do exactly the same as you did and just you know add a few things that they liked and and bring it more and more and a lot of games don't really get how to catch the player on a story base uh and make sure that that is the reason why they come back well to build to build on your point jeff that you just made um you know about you know essentially how you how do you measure then what players would exactly want

when it comes to like narrative versus you know the game mechanics or game design you know especially when if development time is really limited do you you know do you i mean if you know your audience well you can assume what they might enjoy but you know do you think players today would prefer more gameplay over narrative or or what that might be but more importantly is how do you measure that how do you go about uh determining that well if i if i look at how we do that internal mem games we have a certain focus group with us um it's like a couple of hundred people and and we give them various different types of puzzles different type of narrative um and then we really test with how they react to it so it's it's part of the survey is not really that important it's we want to see their face we want to see how they react what the emotion is um are they really frustrated or angry because sometimes people say that they didn't like a part but

just like caroline said sometimes you have a really emotional roller coaster and you need to make a choice which is you know really serious and you're like really emotional about it i don't want to i don't want to kill that person or i don't want to do that and they feel like they don't like it but it's actually one of the best parts in in the game or best part you can do with your product so just not only ask in a survey but really you know put on a camera just watch how they experience your product and then say okay this this works they maybe they say they hate it but they love it i see it would others agree with that i mean do you do you all do similar methods in terms of gauging uh you know doing used research engaging gauging their feedback um well well actually what we are doing is we are basically cutting out the whole gameplay point in a sense so we actually do interactive fiction like really like a text based so kind of like the choose your own adventure books

so we're building uh building a tool for the authors to use so that it's basically just really simple so that they can write uh right text and if they want to do a choice we give them basically boxes like put the text in the tracking the words counting the words that the users are scrolling past um and then seeing like what choices they make so so for us because we have taken out the whole element of the of the kind of gameplay and made it all about the story we are getting really interesting days are both for the writers because they are so used to just like releasing a novel then seeing if it sells if it doesn't it doesn't if it does it does but like they they don't know what works what doesn't and we are like well try

this platform and then you know if they all stop on page 10 so so that's that that's one way we we just we we're building we're bringing the game type data to the actual authors who are used to doing this in a in a different setting and they find even the the like lowest lowest amount of data really interesting because they haven't had anything before we do we we do it in a slightly different way um which is quite fun in that for us it's all about dialogue you know and it's all actually the story the way it's written is all through dialogue so imagine that might be in comic book form or you know interactive graphic or graphic novel imagine that and you've got a format then that is 99 dialogue and in fact you know the way we've started with with the charisma app that there was to license these 50 page long graphic novels and then adapt them

because the medium fits that's another story but what we can see then is because it's dialogue we can see anonymized but we can see exactly how people are responding because we can see what they're saying so if a character says something and then the player is saying something we can see what that sentence is so there is there's the data which is sort of you know i guess empirical data of how many people are going through certain branches and paths and what you'd expect but then it's down to that granular level um of are they are they saying are they interacting you know it's how as well as what um and from that actually you know we'll do you know when we first launch a new title we may do an update today an update every other day the players don't see anything because it's all on the charisma back end and it just goes up live but we're looking at that data seeing how people are responding and it becomes a not quite real time but incredibly

responsive way of our updating and then you know as as we can do in this medium that that um refresh rate then slows down after a week or two um as as you know as we were starting to cater for all the different scenarios so it's fun it's still it's a fun way to you know to look at how people are how how people are interacting with the story because you can really see how they're feeling yeah that's fantastic um so yeah do in terms of building out a story and adding some kind of narrative to a game do you is there a major difference between creating a plot for a single player game versus multiplayer is it essentially the same challenge or what would be the difference if there is if i look at the game that we're making we're making co-op games cooperative if we if we would think of a single-player way we would do the game then probably our player would be the hero um and

and we would make a incredible plot that he had to save or save the world or whatever and now we make a co-op game and because it's about two people we think about you know this story has to be about just those two not about the world the world is facilitating and as creating a setting and and you know is something that is a mechanic in the story but we want to make just a story about these two and not caring about not really care so much about the rest of the world they don't have to save the world they just maybe have to save each other or you know find each other or whatever uh so i think that if you look at players and connecting them together uh it's it's a different thing because you'll have to think about story and how to connect these people together and how make sure that everyone has a place in the world and it's it's really necessary to see the other player and when you create a single player game then

probably you're you know you're the the main guy you're really important and then the world has to revolve around you i also think so how we're thinking about it as well is just adding a lot more social layers so our stories are linear stories um and there's no choices you just follow them along so everyone has the same story effectively but if you join in the same day as someone else you can talk to them you can interact with them so for us it's about how do we facilitate the sharing of those emotions that you feel as the story progresses so it can be as simple as talking to people and making friends with them all the way through to sharing emojis or or sharing specific parts of the story so i think i think increasingly social is going to become a bigger and bigger part and that's either with your direct friends or just anyone else who might be experiencing that game um or experience at the same time as you i was trying to think back okay when so in the late 90s i produced a massively

multiplayer online role-playing game called diaspora which was like a sort of online version of elite and i was writing a lot of missions for those and it is and i think jeff was sort of alluding to this structurally it's very different because you have to you have to anticipate that that moment in the story takes place not only for a single player at a moment in time but for ineffectively infinite number of players at any moment in time and the story still needs to make sense given that set of parameters so what we tended it was it was it was not again it was not easy but what we tended to do was rely on a lot of dynamic data coming back from where players were so you're feeding into a spine of the structure um like contextual moments that make sense if that makes sense so there would be a mission but the details of the mission would be dynamically drawn on from other

other areas of the game and it had to be that way because because otherwise you were going to get um you know part of the i think the other thing about that's very different from a regular story in whatever definition that is in the game story is that the game story is designed to be replayed and you can argue you can argue my kids who read harry potter 20 times will argue against this but you know you know the the the replayability in the book sort of um you can read it again but you'd expect the same thing to happen again whereas in a game when you replay it you sort of expect something different to happen because you're improving and you're learning on it and i think that's a it's a structural difference in the way that those stories are created and it's sort of down to the dna you know you've got to go down to the core of the story again

hey um any okay well let's move on um so we have we do have a couple of questions building up so we're going to get to those in just a moment and just a reminder to folks watching if you have any questions to this great panel please put them in the q a because we are about to get to those uh very soon um so just another another point here is as as the game market is getting more and more competitive as we all know very well especially when it comes to user acquisition and retention do you think especially when it comes to the more classic form of interactive media or excuse me interactive fiction um what do you think about adding additional things like voice input and video clips and other kinds of things that we're trying to sort of break the barrier a bit with the player so it's not just about reading it's not just about clicking um there's um there's more capabilities that we're we're able to do now especially as ai and other things get more advanced so i'm curious about what your thoughts on are are on

you know adding these additional modes that we can uh engage the players it's like a lost phone games effectively so you have characters phones so we've gone really broad with it where we've tested everything from a 50-hour live feed that you can tune into any time through to launching a podcast through characters having social media profiles that you can visit um through to voice notes um i think the key thing that we found is actually the big benefit of having these is twofold one if as we've talked about if characters are if users are into the story it just creates such better retention being able to interact with those mechanics so being able to watch a video or listen to a podcast keeps you coming back and engage with the story more and then secondly i think if you do it really well

does this surprise and delight element as well so we get a large amount of traffic through people tagging their friends on characters instagram profiles so they're so surprised their fictional character has has a real instagram profile that they'll share that as opposed to the app which then drives downloads um so i think if you if you do it smartly those little tactics can actually help reduce cpi's as well in in a smart way that's what we've certainly found yeah quite recently i've been involved with some vr productions and you know that's that's something that's that feels totally new as a game developer because you usually feel that you can take the camera and you know show that and this is what you're going to see yeah this is what you're going to hear but in vr especially when you do free roaming vr with with multiple people in the in the same world it's like you you cannot direct anything i mean they look everywhere and they miss exactly the story that you're

trying to tell uh and that that kind of opened my eyes in how you can tell a story without telling the story you know what what can you do in the world what can you do what's going on during the game play and telling a lot of story without people really feeling it as a character talking to you or [Music] really having to read something or having to actually pick something up and along the way you can you know sometimes dynamically make sure that they find something or that they hear something or that they notice something and that's something that i really notice when you're making vr you cannot grab the player and force them to see something so you need to do it in a natural way for us it's all about voice you know um it's key it's voicing voice out uh so our entire gameplay revolves around you know that you mentioned ai around natural language processing that's our interface

is the natural language and if you you know uh the bulletproof project we did for sky bulletproof.sky.com which is still up there you're sitting down sat opposite someone and it is a video um character who's like a serial killer and you are you're talking you know it's a it's a you're talking to him and he talks back and you know we took the actor after we did the shoot we took him out into the sound engineer's car and padded up the car and you know recorded his voice and then uh fed that into um resemble ai's system that then trained a new programmatic voice so you know we kind of have a serial killer talking like siri it just wouldn't work um you know so so he got this guy and captured his voice and then tweaked it it's a fine art to do it and then that's what speaks back to you is the voice of a serial killer and i i think it's you know um i do think it's it's it's a way it's a it's a completely it's the way forward for us you know

it's and there's no right way wrong way but our view is that we want to place the player or the reader inside the story and that positioning is key from a writer's perspective it's very difficult but you know you want to get them inside and and voice for us is um and ai is is vital in the way that we tell the stories excellent well if um for the sake of time if you don't mind we're gonna shift to the q a we've got a couple of great questions here to start with and you'd mention siri so i will start with this question where um someone was asking where do the panelists stand on audio games do alexa and siri represent an opportunity for interactive fiction to come back to the mainstream um well i i i checked out a panel on on these games uh the last gdc that uh was in san francisco and to me there was a really interesting audience um

for these in in actually kids so maybe not not the adults who want to spend so much time or there must be adult audience too but for kids it was it was really natural so that when when they like listen to the story um it is natural for them to to feel that it should be interactive going like no no don't go there and do do the other thing so so i think that's that might really really catch on it was super interesting i mean my view on it just briefly is is you know alexa is a black cylinder siri is a mobile and you know one and in essence they are built to be search engines or very quick retail experiences you know to do so our viewers is that those whether it's siri or alexa or any other sort of speech thing it's about getting you in and out as fast as possible whereas actually what what we want is we want people to all of us around here is we want people

to have the conversation and stay in the story for as long as possible that's our success so i think with and alexa because you're limited to that you know that black cylinder or you know thing is is um is a bit of a challenge and i think they're quite limited in the technology but uh the fact that you know kids are starting to use it great you know let's um you know let's we can broaden it down from there i've seen some really good by the way nothing to do with that i've seen some really interesting experiments in in like uh first person shooter voice interfaces because you have to be microsecond perfect and they work and it's it's it's you know it's exciting to see how that's going to come on it's different about storytelling but it's an aside well you also have the uh the game i guess it was from ubisoft bridge crew based on star trek and they're using ibm watson and then you have this crew around you you're in vr you have to screw around

you and you can give orders you know half impulse uh you know 30 degrees that way and i must say that the first time i played that i i i expected it to be sucky but it was really good and it also then feels really natural not like you're playing a game you're just playing a game with others and i can't imagine that if you use something like siri or alexa like all the time it could be you know really just a discussion partner and why not use fiction instead of you know everyday things i was the last thing i was going to add which i don't know if anyone's done i was just thinking about um i think i get i think with audio again context is really important so i could totally imagine like if you were on a long car journey and your car was siri enabled like creating games in that scenario that would be yeah i think it definitely depends on like what the context is but yeah i think i think with kids or in car with kids or with friends could be really cool yeah and at least i know uh there's a

swedish company called ear play that is trying to or their their goal is to make this um like audio choose your own adventure type of things it it it really looks interesting too so i'm i'm watching them closely great um another another question we have is um it so often happens that adding narratives nicely done cut scenes animations etc take much more effort and cost than to build the level that comes after it uh considering that players mostly like to spend their time actually playing the game do you think this massive overhead still makes sense well maybe well the the reason why i sounded doing the project that i'm on now was really that when i was looking at um getting like how game writing is done and and i love it i love game writing i've done it and and it's really the the immersion is such a such a different level than in in uh books

um that it's super interesting but it it was like so often did i run into the issue like no we can't do this because it's too expensive we can't buy the animations or like and and so kind of this was the whole thought behind like could we maybe cut out the animations and the and the visuals and all of this and just to the interactive writing point that that i found super interesting so that's that's at least one way to do it but of course that doesn't have all with gameplay uh we we're here we what we usually do is we make uh what we call an emotional rollercoaster so we determine you know the whole game and how your emotion is going to be through the whole game um and then we noticed uh through tests that you know if we make something very hard but we reward you with the cutscene where you

finally find your friend or you get that item that you were looking for that makes the whole gameplay you did one and a half hour before valuable that's why you do it that's that's you know that's that's the cream of the cake that that is the reward that you're looking for so for us we we sometimes need to have that because else the gameplay is just you know just another puzzle just another puzzle just another way to come out and this is something people actually strive for and want to play the game just to get that 30 seconds of reward so if i need to be honest i think that a lot of the gameplay we have wouldn't be really that interesting if there wasn't a reward for it yeah and i i did um i i analyzed a lot of the the storytelling games and what it looks like basically is that there is the initial setup like

this is who you are this is where you are like usually uh then it's it's often said like well this is what you should be doing and this is the problem and then there has to be something before the problem is solved and that's that's kind of that's the gameplay like for dragon age origins you have to go through the different dungeons and only then can you go to the end end battle and it wouldn't make sense in any other way so there has to be the journey to to the um actual end resolution and it really doesn't even matter so much like what is being done especially if it's enjoyable if it's if it's nice playing it it works it's it's a decent game to play it in the narrative it just it needs something in between and then maybe that the narrative is the journey but how back to what she was saying about context you write it slightly differently for every story because every story is going to be slightly different and every medium is going to be slightly different and that

makes sense to do it in that way um otherwise yeah you get into cut scenes which is um you know if there's a skip button at the bottom of a cut scene you you know it's not really meant to be there okay well um let's see we we do have one last question um as we wrap up here so do you think that non-verbal narrative is better for localizing games are images and visuals the best way to communicate a story universally that's a tough one it's definitely easier um i think because as soon as you've got like with those we have a lot of text and video and photos and yeah it's very story driven and i think the challenge with story is again it's about context and uh about cult truck contacts is really

important as well so i think those are some of we have a story where a girl goes missing after a night out that wouldn't really fly in the middle east because that culture doesn't really exist of going out and drinking um so yeah i think i think it is definitely more challenging so i guess it depends on the experience that you need to build right um yeah it's uh and it's again it's interesting the cultural piece i go with totally you know uh we were looking at whether or not to put emojis into into the system and you think oh well you know that's surely the same around the world and it's totally not i mean it's dialectized within countries so you you know the the ways even even in answer to the question you know those those images may not resonate across different countries so i think there is no silver bullet there's no right or wrong it is a uh but as long as one's thinking about it then you're sort of halfway there and you're sensitive to it

yeah and i i kind of like well we do text mainly so localization for us means actually localizing the text and to me it feels like maybe the the only like fine like fi fine meanings of of text are really difficult to convey in in like images or sounds or this way so the kind of general feeling maybe that that's like i said that's that's only culture and specific specific so we can't even do the same kind of like it's black so this is sad type of thing because then we go to japan and it's like that's black is not sad so certainly like then i don't know text is kind of localizing text is is kind of the safest way you know go ahead well you know it's also what really is difficult is you need a

translator that actually gets what you're trying to say and why you're trying to say it so sometimes we get the translation and then i find the native speaker in that language and i say okay you know go through these texts and tell me what the story is about or tell me what we're trying to say and when it's the first draft of a translation usually there's always something missing so don't don't think that if you have a really good translator and he he translated perfectly that he really gets the essence make sure that you find a few native speakers in every language that you publish in and ask them what is the emotion what do you feel why you think we're saying this and then you can maybe find better words to do so be really really specific with translations and yes and with that and i'll just add my footnote as a geographer who does culturalization work in the game industry which i'm speaking about at 5 p.m on

friday during this very conference um yeah this is a it's a super complicated topic i mean the even doing non-visual or excuse me non-lingual um you know non-text-based can be really really tricky just like guy was mentioning i mean icon design all of that kind of stuff color usage it all has um has to be adapted to some degree or another so it basically there's no easy way out is the way i would put it so um with that though we have run out of time and so i'd like to thank the panelists for the excellent discussion this is fascinating and um and also thank you all the attendees for coming today uh and staying with us i think some several of you stayed with us the entire uh game makers insight track so that's a wrap