This past April, With a Terrible Fate was honored to give three talks at PAX East in Boston. One of those talks was about our ongoing series, Now Loading… The Video Game Canon! Now you can watch full video footage of the talk online.
The talk—entitled Which Games Belong in the Video Game Canon?—proceeded in two parts:
- We talked about the nature of canons, their pros and cons, and why we’re developing one for video-game storytelling.
- The audience took a vote on a game to discuss; they chose Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and they chatted with our panel about whether or not it belongs in the video game canon.
Here’s the full description of what to expect:
Literature, philosophy, religion: every discipline has a canon, a set of texts you need to read to understand and appreciate what is going on. What about the Video Game Canon—the video games you just HAVE to play in order to understand and appreciate how video games tell stories? In this panel, we talk with a video game analyst at With a Terrible Fate who is building this very canon. Come decide which video games should be remembered forever, and which should never have been made at all.
Check out footage of our presentation on what a canon is, and why video-game storytelling needs one, here:
And check out the audience/panel discussion on whether Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door belongs in the video game canon here:
It was a pleasure discussing the craft of video-game storytelling with you, PAX East! This follows in the footsteps of a similarly great canon discussion we had at PAX South this past January, and we hope that it foretells other canon conversations still to come!