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. […]
Category: Academic
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
People Like You, Like Blog Posts Like This
In August I was privileged to deliver a keynote at the 2017 Eurocall conference, an established (and very welcoming) community researching Computer Assisted Language Learning. I gave the mid-conference plenary, and notionally talked about how Web Science has changed our understanding of why we have the Web we have. The slide for my talk, titled […]
Mix 2017 – Ambient Literature and Feral Hypertexts
Following on from my trip to ACM Hypertext in Prague I just returned from the Mix 2017 conference, held at Bath Spa University’s Newton Park campus in Somerset. Mix has much more of a focus on practitioners and scholars of digital media and was a really interesting comparison, as well as an enormously fun, lively, […]
Hypertext 2017 and the Festival of Narrative Automata
I spent the last week in Prague at the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media. As usual it was a pleasure to catch up with friends and colleagues, and Prague is a beautiful city. The conference venue used to be a church, and the vaulted ceilings and huge wall frescos certainly added to […]
Crystal Palace – Overground Festival
This week we took the StoryPlaces show in the road for the last time, with a stall in the storytelling area of the Crystal Palace Overground Festival. A few months ago we ran a workshop for local and digital writers at the Upper Norwood Library Hub, and four of our authors produced final stories that […]