Effort Upon Effort: CGSA 2017 Presentation on Japanese-Style FPSs

A blog post about the presentation I did on Japanese-style first-person shooters at the 2017 Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA) Conference.

Michel Sabbagh, Blogger

June 6, 2017

1 Min Read

Recently, I had the opportunity to travel to Toronto and attend the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA) Conference at Ryerson University to learn more about game theory and research from ludological scholars and figures (including Tracy Fullerton, the recipient of the Ambassador Award at GDC 2016). Suffice it to say that I came away with far more knowledge and insight that I initially expected.

Not only that, but CGSA represented a tremendous milestone for me since the beginning of my career as a game writer back in 2015. That achievement is my first public (game design) talk (not including my Thief poster presentation at GDC 2017).

The topic of my talk was none other than Japanese-style first-person shooters, the same subject that I based my college junior academic paper on two years earlier. The presentation was basically a heavily truncated version of the thesis given that I was part of the 5-minute lightning rounds, meaning that 80 pages worth of analysis had to be whittled down to a measly 20 slides. In spite of such aggressive editing, the aura of the paper remained intact and I received positive comments on my ability to condense so much information into a transient talk.