Archive for March 2005

>> playable fictions

“Recently I’ve been thinking about text-only work. It seems there are great opportunities here… of course, we could also use text-only interfaces such as SMS and IM. While I don’t know any SMS novel projects that encourage us to message back, it could certainly be an interface for these projects.” ” Grand Text Auto/

>> games and stories

“Do games tell stories? Answering this should tell us both how to study games and who should study them. The affirmative answer suggests that games are easily studied from within existing paradigms. The negative implies that we must start afresh.” /Games Studies 0101/

>> how can we reinvent games?

Greg Costikyan — the award-winning game-developer — recently brought down the house at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco with a speech calling for games to be created outside the burgeoning, strangling ’studio system’ that’s cropping up in gameland. Now he’s posted a request-for-proposals on this — a public discussion aimed at mining the web to see what comes up…” /Boing Boing/

>> game developers’ amazing rants on the state of the industry

“Alice continues to take fantastic, exhaustive notes at the Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco. She’s just posted her notes from the closing panel in which eminent game developers were invited to rant about the state of the industry. What follows is lewd, hilarious, and very, very true” /Boing Boing/

>> an interview with William Gibson

William Gibson asks, “If I give you my email, will you keep it a secret?” /KFX Studios/

>> game development mistakes

R. Garry Shirts wrote a great article on the Ten ‘Mistakes’ Commonly Made by Persons Designing Educational Simulations and Games.

“If someone were to ask me to identify the mistakes most often made by game designers, including myself, I would, after assuring myself that the questioner understands that game design is a very personal activity and that there are no right answers, reply in the following dogmatic manner…”

Shirts is also the author of Ten Secrets of Successful Simulations:

“The most satisfying experience in training or education, no matter what the subject, is the so-called ‘Aha!’ moment, that instant when sudden, spontaneous insight cuts through the tangle of loose ends in a learner’s mind to reveal a simple, memorable truth.”

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