Jenny Goldstick, our sketchnote reporter-at-large, attended Indiecade, an event dedicated to celebrating independent games. She came back with amazing insights into gaming, comics and interactive storytelling.

From Sequential to Interactive: Visual Novels & General Comics/Gaming Crossover Observations

• One good midway point between comics and interactive games is the “Visual Novel” form.
• There are many crossovers between comics and gaming, particularly in the way the community works.
• There are game cons just like there are comic cons. Just as its important (and fun!) to make connections and friends with similar interests at comic cons, it is also important to do that in a gaming space. Friends are future collaborators.
• It seems like collaboration is really common and even beneficial to the process of making interactive fiction/visual novels.
• There doesn’t seem to be one way to work on a visual novel. Panelists encouraged creators not to be intimidated. There are many tools to help in the process, and it seems like you can jump in anywhere. One of the panelists even organized her visual novel in a Google doc
• It seems like creative people coming into the interactive space who are unfamiliar with the tech side often have unrealistic scope expectations. Watch scope, panelists recommended to start small.

Collaboration Insights from Explorations in Interdisciplinary Art Tech Performances

• Non-linear storytelling extends even beyond gaming – Kate Parsons spoke about a collaborative musical dance performance (seemingly analogous or at least in the same formal category as Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”!)
• Like the Visual Novel panelists, Kate Parsons emphasized the importance (and inevitability) of collaboration working cross-medium
• In collaboration, it’s very important to find a common denominator in terms of conceptual interests
• It’s also important for collaborators to have complementary strengths
• Collaboration lets the meaning of a project become “emergent”. This means that the meaning and purpose of the project develops over time – it seems like this is a valuable part of collaboration, and that its good to be open to this and to embrace it

Thanks Jenny Goldstick! We can’t wait to see where you’ll be next.

[the image at the top of the post is from Jenny’s interactive story, THIS IS MY MEMORY OF FIRST HEARTBREAK, WHICH I CAN’T QUITE PIECE BACK TOGETHER]