Conceived originally as an exclusive masterclass with award-winning Larian Studios, creators of Baldur’s Gate 3 (Game of the Year, 2023), the Bristol Digital Game Lab’s November 2025 workshop – Your Choices Matter: How Larian Writers Tell the Player’s Story – ended up packing an auditorium with upwards of a hundred students. Talking over the event with Game Lab co-directors Dr Richard Cole and Dr Mike Samuel, it became apparent that not only did the event spark ideas around the Lab’s training programme in narrative design, but that it redrew and reframed the possibilities of the Lab’s work, in particular the collaborative enterprise between game studies and the games industry.
The workshop saw students and researchers working up their own storylines and ideas alongside Larian writers Chrystal Ding and Adrienne Law. A lengthy Q&A provided insights into the design process of game narratives, the environment of a video game writers’ room, and the background, skillset and worldview the games industry looks for in a prospective writer.
Reflecting on the workshop, both Richard and Mike found themselves seeing in the event a model. Mike highlighted that the workshop evinced not a demarcated hierarchy between the student body, academia and the creative industries, but an environment of three-fold exchange. In its requirement for world builders, the game industry looks toward creatives with a scholarly background to interrogate relevant fields of research. To know how something happened and why is to provide a grounding in reality for a fantasy world, deepening the pleasures of that world via authenticity. Researchers look toward the industry for creative iterations on the subjects of their study, for alternative means of expressing their research, and as a meeting point between what they research and the student body. And the student body looks for opportunities between the two to apply the knowledge they have gained in a creative medium they are passionate about.
Both Mike and Richard drew attention to the approachability of the Larian writers, which created an inviting environment where students felt free to share personal and creative ideas. This generated an intertextual rapport in the room as discursive threads were exchanged between professionals, scholars and students. Comparably, Mike drew attention to the atmosphere of optimism the workshop generated. The games industry is often, and accurately, criticised for exploitative labour practices, employment scarcity, and the extremities of production culture. Adrienne and Chrystal, and Larian at large, exemplified to the students an alternate possibility, and a destination where a collaborative and healthy creative employment is achievable. To cite a piece of student feedback the Lab received following the event, the workshop “made working in the industry feel more possible”.
In the reflective conversations I had regarding the event with Richard and Mike, what was palpable was how illustrative the workshop came to be both in the direction of the Lab going forward, and in the pair’s overall approach to the interweaving of game studies and the creative industries. In the first instance, Mike suggested the event formed a template for how the Lab saw their events functioning – with the organizers taking a backseat and an emphasis placed on fluid conversational exchange between participants, students, and speakers; an event where student-industry dialogue is focalized.
With the Bristol Digital Game Lab soon to launch an MA in Games Design (Narrative) for the 2026/27 academic year, the workshop also offered base principles and a destination. It exemplified how narrative game design is enacted and pursued professionally. In its capacity to engage a diverse body of students, from all manner of disciplinary and personal backgrounds, the workshop highlighted the amenability of such a curriculum for students seeking further training that invites a wide range of skills and experiences. In its foregrounding of a professional space where scholarship, creativity, and community are entwined, it highlighted a working future based in collaboration and conscientiousness. Both the workshop and the forthcoming MA program respond to questions raised by students on the Approaching Video Games module offered in the Department of Film & Television – how does one enter the industry, how do I take my formal academic training into the world of game development? In these two ventures is the seed of an answer.
The Lab is grateful for the wealth of student contribution and support, and in particular to Adrienne and Chrystal for their geniality and generosity. A propulsion, a guide, an indication – or simply a stellar example of the potential for collaboration between industry professionals, researchers and the student body.
