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 […]
Games/Hypertext
Over the Summer I took part if the ACM Hypertext 2020 conference, hosted in Florida but run online, and gave a presentation to the Blue Skies track on the relationship between Games and Hypertext. It develops some of the ideas that I presented at the Future of Text symposium at the beginning of the year. […]
Game Design 2020
Once more we have just completed our Games Design and Development course at Southampton. This year we slimmed things down a little and asked the students to work in pairs to create two prototype games. They have around 4 weeks to do each game. The first is focused on level design, and in particular creating […]
Here are the Hypertexts
This month I gave an invited talk at The Future Of Text event held at Southampton University. FoT has been organised by Frode Hegland (currently a PhD student at the University) for 10 years, and is an interdisciplinary talking shop for anyone who is interested in text in the digital age. It’s an open topic […]
Life is Strange: One Choice vs. No Choice
DONTИOD’s Life is Strange, released in 2015, was a surprise indie hit, marrying Telltale style episodic interactive narrative, environmental storytelling, and narrative puzzles, with a nostalgic coming of age tale. It also happened to be a fantastic exploration of teenage relationships, told through the lens of Max and Chloe and their search to find out what […]
The Dean of Liminal Studies
Back in the Spring, when all things seemed possible, Claus Atzenbeck, General Chair of ACM Hypertext, asked myself and my long term collaborator Charlie Hargood whether we could write a locative Hypertext for the conference. Nothing to big, something simple. Filled with the breezy optimism of March we said yes. The result is our second collaborative project, ‘The Dean of Liminal Studies’, a locative story […]