The next Media in Transition conference (see reports from the last one: 1 2) will focus on storage and transmission - a hot topic in digital media that continues to heat up. Note that although the deadline is not until January 9, submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, so those with ideas for the […]
Rilke turned to writing poems in French because there was no good word for “absence” in German. J. R. Carpenter’s in absentia presents place and the lack of place in English and French, mashing up a Google map (or, actually, a satellite view) of Montréal with rental and real estate annotations by herself and […]
Malcolm Ryan has started a new project on his new blog, Words on Play, to review one book a week, covering topics such as game design and interactive narrative. The list is not restricted to those books that have just recently been released. The review project was prompted, in part, by his recently starting a […]
I’m pleased to announce, and link to, the first work in Inform 7 by a major poet. Now, it does compile without any trouble in its current form, but the file might need further editing to actually produce a playable, enjoyable game. Is anyone up to it?
In the past, when Pat Harrigan and I both contributed to a book, it was always as the editors. But now Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball (from gameplaywright) have announced Things We Think About Games. Pat and I each shared a little of what we think with the book’s author/editors, as did such folks […]
The latest issue of The Iowa Review Web, volume 9, number 2, is out. This is a special issue on “Instruments and Playable Texts,” guest-edited by long-singing hypertext star Stuart Moulthrop, author of the 1991 Victory Garden and winner of the 2007 Vinaròs prizes in both narrative and poetry. One of his prize-winning pieces, […]
This September will be the third Game Writers Conference, now called the Writing for Games Track, part of the annual Austin GDC. The theme this year is “The Future of Storytelling in Games”, and includes intriguing lecture titles and topics such as “Galatea 3.0: Designing and Writing Great Game Characters”, “New Interfaces, New Gamewriting Opportunities”, […]
There is apparently “anti-video game legislation” happening in New York state. Check out the letter from our own J.D.R. to NY developers, and if you are a New Yorker, decide to help if you can.
” Dear IGDA member/user,
Unfortunately, the anti-video game bill “S 6401 A/A 11717″ has passed both the House and Assembly and […]
I’m honored to announce that Second Person is a finalist for the Diana Jones Award! Pat and I are very pleased to be in such great company, ranging from a major RPG (Grey Ranks) to an innovative festival (Come Out and Play), a worthy charity (Child’s Play), a popular podcast (Canon Puncture), and an […]
I haven’t posted for the past few months, a big reason being that I’ve been consumed by starting up a new game production studio in my home town of Portland. In May I founded Stumptown Game Machine, a sister company to Procedural Arts. SGM’s first project is to build a substantial collection of […]
The Games, Learning, and Society conference v. 4.0 this year in Madison Wisconsin gathered an insightful group of educators and designers who are intent on making a difference in the domain of learning and play. I ran a workshop there for Values at Play, and many of the panels during the full two days […]
Ian Bogost just pointed me to a page on building your own modern version of Tennis for Two, the proto-Pong, proto-Odyssey game that Willy Higinbotham devised in 1958. It’s just the thing to do with that oscilloscope you have lying around. Interesting that the game is in side view and has a net, unlike […]
Sorry, our blog went south for the summer. We’re back now.
Three of us (Andrew, Michael, and yours truly) attended the first AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies in November of last year just outside Washington D.C. Andrew provided a summary of the talks and mentioned that the gathering was a productive and interesting one. I found the talks and discussion to be very stimulating, and […]
Quick link — the pioneering electronic literature author Deena Larsen has been putting together a site for high school and introductory college teachers of electronic literature as a creative writing or rhetoric course called Fundamentals: Rhetorical Devices for Electronic Literature that does a great job of describing some of the basics of how the electronic […]
Last month UCSD hosted SoftWhere 2008 — the first software studies workshop in North America. It was a great experience compressed into a short time period, with one afternoon for an overview of the broad variety of work being done by participants and one morning for a set of focused discussions on the state […]
Remember the Codework workshop at WVU - the one about the relationship between creative writing and programming? Maybe not, but my posts on on Emmett Williams’s IBM Poem and programs Ted Nelson likes were from there. Nineteen short position papers from the workshop are now available online in PDF. Although the index is somewhat uninformative, […]
Brown is raising Interrput 2008, an electronic literature festival that will run October 17-19.
Henry Lowood’s article about the Machinima Archive explains some of the value of preserving records of player perfomance. Thanks to Matt Kirschenbaum for the link.
A growing list of teaching projects that use Inform 7 appears now on Emily Short’s site. Short has […]
As part of his recent research, Edgar Huang of the Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis School of Informatics has posted a list of (currently) 170 new media programs in the US that offer a bachelor’s degree or higher. Any program that appeared to declare itself as a new media program was included. For whatever […]
On Wednesday June 4th, our Values at Play advisory board met to discuss year two of the VAP project:
Tracy Fullerton (USC, Co-founder and director of the EA Game Innovation Lab), Celia Pearce (Georgia Tech, Director of the Experimental Game Lab), Katie Salen (Parsons, Executive Director of the Gamelab Institute of Play), and Jesper Juul […]