This is a great thread, and I'm going to add six more talks--three more narrative-focused, and three more design-focused--that in my experience are broadly discussed. If you've been working in narrative a while, you may nod sagely; if you haven't seen these, you will want to. https://twitter.com/kchironis/status/1353753624883552256

My thread isn't "AAA designers discuss these" so much as "emergent narrative designers and narratively-interested systems designers discuss these"; and I may add more later. But these are talks that have, in my experience, been considered lingua franca in narrative spaces.

1: @joningold's Sparkling Dialogue. About how to drive conversations dynamically and naturalistically in games. Your dialogue will be better for it.

2: Subnautica's postmortem. I am fully losing my mind that this was GDC 2019; I missed it live & explicitly remember @lizardengland telling me it was great, & she was right. It's an open talk about their whole design process; I hear it come up often.

3: @betterthemask's "Writing NPCs with Agency" talk from GDC 2016. I've found all of Meghna's talks to be insightful, but this one about decentering protagonists is really essential consideration for good narrative design.

4: "Cursed Problems in Game Design" is from 2019 and already iconic. @Blinkity breaks down cursed problems and how to solve for them. Multiple designers I work with probably have vendettas against me by now for calling certain things cursed problems.

5: This talk on dynamic dialogue in L4D is great. @RadioSachka reminded me how many times we have all been sent this talk. It is very good; sometimes there are more relevant solutions than the one proposed here; please do not send it to me again.

6: The third of the design talks I'm linking, Mark Rosewater on lessons learned through designing MtG. You can learn so much from Rosewater's talks/blogs. This one in particular comes up constantly