15 Mar 11/16/17 World Building Workshop

Join us for a two-hour world building workshop led by game designer Matthew Weise — founder of Empathy Box, a company that specializes in narrative design for games and across media.

The World Building Workshop is an in-depth, media-agnostic course where participants learn the ins and outs of dramatic interactivity. They will learn how to take one simple concept — verbs — and use it to cut right to the heart of story, character, and action. They will learn how to build compelling, emotional worlds from this foundation, and how those worlds can as easily be a game, a comic, a movie, or a painting. The goal is to teach media-makers how to create systemic, dramatic worlds that can generate any number of stories, serving as an inspiration and/or foundation for their future work.

Matthew Weise is a game designer and educator whose work spans industry and academia. He is the CEO of Empathy Box. He was the Narrative Designer at Harmonix Music Systems on Fantasia: Music Evolved, the Game Design Director of the GAMBIT Game Lab at MIT, and a consultant for Warner Bros., Microsoft, PBS, The National Ballet of Spain, and others on storytelling and game design. His work, both creatively and critically, focuses on transmedia adaptation with an emphasis on the challenges of adapting cinema into video games. Matt has given lectures and workshops on film-to-game adaptation all over the world, and has published work on how franchises like Alien, James Bond, and horror cinema in general are adapted into games. Links to his writing and game design work, including his IGF nominated The Snowfield, can be found at www.matthewweise.com.