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. […]
Author: dem
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Persona 5 and Agency Misdirection
I love a good RPG, but as someone who grew up with PC gaming (ok, ok, it might have been Commodore 64 gaming, but who’s counting a few bits) I missed out on the JRPG experience. Final Fantasy was massive on the NES, but I was busy playing the original Bard’s Tale, and then the […]
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 […]