Watch the PC Gamer PAX panel featuring Minecraft, DayZ, The Walking Dead, Bastion, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown

It took us a while to figure out what sort of panel we wanted to put on at PAX.

It took us a while to figure out what sort of panel we wanted to put on at PAX. We knew we wanted to do more than a live version of our podcast (we do that every week)! We settled on storytelling as a topic because it's a particularly interesting moment in gaming for stories and storytellers. BioWare released the first fully-voiced MMO, and it responded to fan feedback about Mass Effect 3. "Choice" as a concept is leaking into every genre it can. Story generatorslike DayZ are innovating with systems rather than scriptwriting. But wait—conventional storytellers like Telltale are finding novel ways of humanizing characters.

To solve all of these creative quagmires in a mere hour, we called in some developers:

Sean Vanaman- Creative Lead, The Walking Dead

Jake Solomon- Lead Designer, XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Greg Kasavin- Creative Director, Supergiant Games

Markus "Notch" Persson- Creator, Minecraft, Founder of Mojang

Dean "Rocket" Hall- Creator, DayZ

http://youtu.be/Qkr_xYRG6bo

Watch the full hour conversation above. Thanks to everyone who came, and to our gallery of sages. Here are more photos from the panel, too.