April 20, 2011
I wrote this article for my friend Chris Charla’s hilarious blog http://incrediblystrangegames.com, but it’s only appeared on paper so I thought I’d make it public here.
Polygons for Plot
The games industry has settled on polygons as the fundamental primitive for 3d graphics, but is there an equivalent for interactive storytelling? The narrative alchemists over at Fail Better Games are on the trail of one, and their proof of concent is the award-winning social game Echo Bazaar. Echo Bazaar is one of the best-written games of the decade, and the company deserves the attention they’ve received for it. The interface of the game is a familiar Mafia-Wars-style text RPG, but its premise — that the city of London has been stolen and brought underground by bats — is twisted and compelling. Once inside, the player finds a universe as deeply compelling as the best fiction has to offer. [0]
But just as interesting as Echo Bazaar’s content, in my opinion, is its underlying skeleton. For the game, Fail Better designed a new structure for interactive storytelling called Quality-Based Narrative. As the designer of the second game that employed it, I’m very excited about the possibilities it presents for games with plot. Like printed choose-your-own-adventure books, it’s easy for non-technical writers to create, edit and collaborate on stories written as quality-based narratives. Yet the structure allows for truly deep and interactive storytelling that thus far has only been possible in more technically complicated text adventures. Serving as an underlying narrative design, quality-based narrative could make deeper and more truly interactive stories possible in many other kinds of games.
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June 15, 2010
I gave a presentation at a New York Arts, Culture and Technology meetup gathering themed around Gaming and the Arts…thanks so much Julia and Brad for inviting me. The event was very lively and all the presentations, including mine, centered around themes of games, system thinking, art, culture and education.
My presentation was a look at a few examples of how the tropes that games have adapted from other arts and resynthesized to allow for interactivity are now, in turn, affecting practitioners of those other arts.
There are so many examples — but I pulled a few that I was familiar with, centered around film, music and theater. I think the fact that critics so consistently reach for words like “cross between …, like … plus …” to describe so many of these cross-genre productions indicates that we’re on the verge of a new vocabulary for these mashups of the arts. And I am so excited for a bigger, bolder, and more mainstream future for all of these explorations into artistic interactivity.
June 11, 2010
ECHO TEAM ran a 24-hour game jam at our office space at Pier 38 a few weekends ago, and it was a blast. The theme was GROWTH. We had four teams in total, and in 24 hours (+1 bonus hour!) of intense production, we came up with four complete prototypes:
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April 10, 2010
I recently led a session at Wherecamp entitled “Maps and Play: Effective Maps for Social and Strategic Spaces.” We had a great conversation and I thought I’d post some of the notes here publicly.
The key observation that led me to hold this session was that the emerging metaphor for interacting with location-based services has been the list, not the map. I think that more stripped-down formats have prevailed because Google-style maps are not suited for the non-geographic spaces that games and social tools inhabit.
I think that this doesn’t have to be the case. The capabilities of maps to display rich, deep visual and spatial relationships is unparalleled. But maybe we need to rethink what effective maps for communicating non-geographic spaces might look like, and talk about how to build these maps.
This five minute presentation set the context for the conversation.
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