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 […]
Category: Hypertext and Narrative
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 […]
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 […]
Crystal Palace Writer’s Workshop
As part of the StoryPlaces project we recently ran a workshop for writers in Crystal Palace Park, exploring the creation of locative stories. The workshop was based in the Upper Norwood Library Hub, and we invited local writers, and also digital writers from Southampton who were keen to experiment with locative media in the park. […]
The Narrative Structure of The Witcher 3
Let’s get this out of the way first. The Witcher 3 is an astonishingly good game: fun, engaging, massive, and worthy of just about every superlative you could chug down before overdosing on praise and reaching for your White Honey. It’s a very good game. It also has a strong narrative, and while The Witcher 3 […]
StoryPlaces – Bournemouth Natural Science Society
This week we once again climbed down the long ivory staircase from the University in order to run the second of our location-based story events for the Leverhulme funded StoryPlaces project. This time as part of the Bournemouth Arts By the Sea festival, and focused around the wonderful collection and people of the Bournemouth Natural Science […]