Over a decade ago I co-founded the Narrative and Hypertext workshop at ACM Hypertext with Charlie Hargood, and it’s run almost every year since. The workshop is a highlight of the conference for me, as it’s somewhere where you can discuss ideas and viewpoints (whereas the main tracks tend to be reserved for completed research). […]
Game Design 2022
Another academic year, and another completed run of our Game Design course. This is a third year course where we take Computer Science and Software Engineering students through the principles of Game Design and Development, using Unity as our engine. Each year we set the students two challenges. The first is to create a game […]
On The Margins 2022 – What is Hypertext?
This page was created for attendees of the ‘What is Hypertext‘ workshop held at the On the Margins conference on the 15th December 2022. Thanks to everyone who took part in the workshop. Hypertext is a foundational technology of our modern digital culture. Its history goes back over six decades. In the 60s pioneers such […]
Narrative and Hypertext Workshop 2022
This week I co-ran the 10th Narrative and Hypertext Workshop at ACM Hypertext 2022 (in Barcelona, although I attended remotely). The workshop is an event I founded with Charlie Hargood back in 2011, focused on bringing together the worlds of Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) and Hypertext research. This year’s workshop was focused on a new […]
Game Design 2021
The close of the University’s first semester means the completion of the 2021 Games Design course that I run with Tom Blount and Age Chapman for our third year computer science students. This was the seventh run of the module, which is starting to feel properly established at this point. The idea is to give […]
Special Issue of NRHM on ACM HT’19
In 2019 I acted as the co-programme chair for ACM Hypertext 2020, it was the 30th anniversary of conference, and the last event I attended in person what with one thing and another. As part of the programme we arranged for some of the best papers at the conference to by published in the New […]
Disco Elysium: Scrutable Hypertext
Last year I played the excellent whodunnit RPG Disco Elysium by ZA/UM. It’s already become something of a classic due to its a genius take on an RPG engine, as the four core abilities of the player character (Intellect, Psyche, Physique, and Motorics) manifest through twenty sub-skills, each of which is effectively an aspect of […]
The Balance of Attention
The StoryPlaces project ran from 2016 to 2019 with the aim of investigating the poetics of locative literature, and we have recently had the final results of the project published in ACM JOCCH. By poetics, we mean specifically understanding how a locative literature experience works to create an effect in the reader, and our aim […]
No Man Righteous: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops The Line
For a number of years now I have used Spec Ops: The Line (by Yager Development, published by 2K Games) as an example in my lectures on interactive narrative of a game that fuses together its narrative and play. Framed as a classic power fantasy FPS shooter, it subverted all expectations when it was released […]