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. […]

Read More

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 […]

Read More

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 […]

Read More

Games Design Course 2019

Another year, another set of fabulous games from our students on the Games Design and Development course at Southampton. The students get together in pairs and have just three weeks to put a game together. We do three of these game sprints, one based around creating a game with a tutorial, one based around a […]

Read More

Games Design Course 2018

Each year students on our Games Design and Development course at Southampton produce three games as part of the course. The first is intended to show awareness of core mechanics and tutorial design, the second explore interactive narrative, and the third incorporates some innovation from games (for example, procedural generation, locative, or VR). This year’s […]

Read More

ICIDS 2017 – Once and Future Storytelling

In November I attended the International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS’17) on the fantastic island of Madeira. Escaping the British November climate is attraction enough, but the conference was also a great chance to conclude my tour of different interactive narrative communities (the first two being Hypertext and MIX earlier in the year). Valentina Nisi was […]

Read More