MA Interactive Storytelling Design
MA Interactive Storytelling Design
Posted by js1873
5 June 2026
The MA ISD cohort was recently invited to participate in a dialogue and character workshop for Larian Studios. For anyone who may not be familiar, Larian is most famous for creating role-playing video games, like the incredibly popular Divinity franchise and the award-winning Baldur’s Gate 3. We were all so excited for the opportunity to meet, learn from, and ask questions of Chrystal Ding and Adrienne Law, lead and senior writer respectively for Larian Studios UK.
The workshop had two major focuses: authentic characters and meaningful choices.
Chrystal summed up the goal for writing deep, nuanced characters in one sentence: “a good character idea can be sold in a single sentence and takes a Ph.D to explain.” To practice, Chrystal and Adrienne gave us three minutes to randomly create a character, give them one of three possible problems, and write one line of dialogue to explain that problem to the player. We came up with some pretty wacky stuff!
Then, Adrienne described a player’s freedom to make impactful choices as this: “play, choose, live with the consequences.” Our job as writers, then, is to facilitate the player’s ability to play and choose, and to show them the consequences of their playing and choosing. To explore this further, Chrystal and Adrienne instructed us to write five possible player responses to the line of dialogue we wrote, ranging from the best to worst case scenarios. Turns out, that’s really hard! And intentionally so, because it’s what Larian writers do every day.
Above all else, this workshop was an opportunity for a group of nerdy, passionate storytellers like us to learn from the best of the best nerdy, passionate storytellers. We cannot thank Chrystal, Adrienne, Tara, and the whole team at Larian enough for inviting us to participate!