What can I say, 10 of the books arrived today all at once.

20 minutes. Five sellers. One credit card. 25 years of nostalgia.

There’s this RPG contest called Game Chef. But it’s not really a contest. Well it is a contest, but it is a contest in the same way that putting 50 artists into the same city block of some slightly economically depressed but very livable city and giving them the means of collaboration, production, and distribution would naturally become some kind of a contest, but also would become something else and maybe wonderful.

Anyway, the games are done. So many games!

This is pretty brilliant. Thanks to falling down the rabbit hole at Pacian’s cantina and ending up at A Slime Appears I found Guy Debord’s game Kriegspiel. Yeah, that Guy Debord.

He wrote a wargame in the late 70s, and after a couple of editions through the years, it’s now been reproduced as a free digital game by R-S-G. Wow!

Vacation. More fun than should be stuffed into a single word. Vacation should be several words long, really.

There is a lot of information out there for someone who wants to put together an independent/self-directed study in IF + digital narrative, including (I’m always looking for more):

Dennis Jerz’s Studying Interactive Fiction.

Michael Mateas’ 2004 Georgia Tech syllabus for LCC 6317, Interactive Narrative.

see also Brian Magerko’s post-2004 syllabus for same.

Janet Murray’s 2001 LCC 6317 Interactive Narrative at Georgia Tech

compare this with Janet Murray’s 1997 syllabus for MIT 21W765/21L49, Non-Linear and Interactive Narrative: Theory and Practice.

and the 2004 21W.765J / 21L.489J / CMS.845J Interactive and Non-Linear Narrative: Theory and Practice at MIT led by Kurt Fendt.

not to mention the 2006 21W.765J / 21L.489J / CMS.845J Interactive and Non-Linear Narrative: Theory and Practice led by Beth Coleman.

Nick Montfort’s 2003 sample syllabus for a workshop in IF.

Aram Zucker-Scharff’s previously mentioned independent study Interactive Storytelling: Creating Content for Convergent Culture, Games, and The New Storytelling (PDF).

Laura Mandell’s 2006 syllabus for ENG495.D Narrative and Digital Media at Miami University of Ohio.

Lori Landay’s 2001 syllabus for Theory and Practice of Digital Narrative.

A search of RAIF will turn up a few threads as well, including class on if at UGA, and class on if (update), the sequel to the former. The professor of that class, Stephen Ramsay, kindly provided the syllabus for that class to me, and I’m working on getting that into viewable shape (it’s currently in XML).

note: WP doesn’t let me upload CSS or XML, so here’s a hack with both files in one ‘doc’ file — just open it with your text editor, and paste the two files into separate XML and CSS files, or style the XML as you wish. Sorry, the CSS styling is very basic, and I don’t know XSL!

XML and CSS for ENGL4890 syllabus

I have some ideas on starting a co-op study with anyone that’s interested but nothing concrete yet.

I am counting down the days — I’ve taken April off from work. The first couple of weeks will be all about BBQ, horse racing, and wild hogs, which I will try to substantiate with some photos later on, but for the remainder I’m so looking forward to time where I can finish reading a book and playing a game.

Found an interactive content independent study created by Aram Zucker-Scharff, a student at George Mason, and I’m combining that with some other stuff, like the bibliography for Jeremy Douglass’ dissertation.

Or I may just go riding for two weeks. CAN’T WAIT.

Found a new locative media game site courtesy of XYZZYnews:

Wherigo

Now locative games, or ubicomp games, or ARGs, or pervasive games (really I just lump all these together) have so far eluded me. What Wherigo is doing is releasing a builder (for authors) and a player for GPS-enabled devices, so people can go out to specific places and play games. Or, here’s the interesting thing — they have games you can play anywhere. So as near as I can tell, it could be like a cross between LARPing and geocaching.

Nick Currie (aka Momus) said some insightful things on pervasive games recently. While you’re there it’s worthwhile to read about another project he’s planning in London.

I’ve always been interested in this stuff, particularly the audio possibilities (and people doing fictional walking tours etc.). However much of it is quite disturbing — almost as if, even though a world mediated solely by screens makes me sick at a gut level, a world mediated by pervasive games could be even worse.

On the other hand, what are people really creating when they create pervasive games. Perhaps they’re going back to the earliest times, to people creating stories out of the world around them, not living in the nine to five business ‘reality’ many of us have come to know as the norm. Maybe people should be taking their RPGs to the streets.

Or is there something fundamentally different (and wrong) here? Is this form of play a symptom of a deeper problem, a problem of civilization?

Must we invent new forms of art for, in response to, a situation that is itself deeply flawed?

is an oxymoron, right? Maybe I should call this the social space of text games, but…I don’t know.

I’m bringing this up after reading a Matthew Stadler essay at the new Rosa B. (thanks to if:book for the link), a French/English magazine whose layout seems at first quite psychotic — no, perhaps psychedelic, but I grew to like it.

Later in the night after reading the Stadler I read Ursula K. LeGuin’s recent piece in Harper’s. Both this interview of Stadler and LeGuin’s essay rest in part on the social space of art — reading, and discussion.

Looking at muds, here you have a somewhat unique phenomena — people reading collectively, synchronously. And talking about it, maybe not directly, but around it, through it. The pre-existing text is not a novel or a single story, it is a series of points on this graph of experience. Why call it a narrative? For that matter why call it an experience? Is this a fundamental difference between text muds and graphical muds — the social space of reading occurs simultaneously with the text itself. How is this different from the social space of play occurring simultaneously with play in WoW? Is someone who plays WoW out there?

Digressing a bit, I am constantly amazed to discover these new continents of text gaming — does Jove, Digichat, or SEAchat ring a bell for anyone? They didn’t for me until a day ago. And the constant refrain in the mudding community — are text games dead? How can you tell if you never knew who were the living?.

OK, TIGSource is hosting this.

Could you make this game?:

So awesome.

Just wanted to highlight a thread at Story Games on gaming skills (may require registration — totally worth it). Excerpt:

Supporting another player by taking a back seat once in a while: We really can give another player a big boost, even by just knowing that they have the trait, BAD-ASS Swordsman and acting a bit in awe of their skill rather than being a flippant jerk.

Also just sitting back at times and letting the conflict that you know is important to a different character play out, while still having a part and adding your bits to the mix is a real balancing act, I think.

Courtesy of a link at Fair Game, a simple Proppian fairytale generator. I’ve been thinking about joining things like this, the Abulafia generator, and IF in some way.