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Music for a Desert Drive
I’m visiting Joshua Tree in late December. I delayed buying the flight more than I should, and by that time a flight directly into Palm Springs was expensive. The backup plan was to fly into Los Angeles, but this would lead to an slogging drive across legendary urban sprawl in the middle of holiday season…
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“Billiards, but they’re People”
I just finished nearly a whole month of travel, the last bit of which was in Latvia where I participated in a week-long game jam in a castle. Fellow game dev Charlie Behan made a great mini-documentary of the event. I’ve done a lot of game jams, and with this one, I needed to get…
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A Plot Summary of Disney’s 1963 film Sword in the Stone
Merlin: I need to find the boy who will one day be King Arthur, and educate him so he is an effective King. Arthur: I conveniently fell in through your roof. Merlin: I am going to teach you kingly stuff like geometry and Latin. Arthur: Okay. I’m currently a squire, and I want to be…
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Talk @ Roguelike Celebration 2022
This upcoming Sunday, Oct 23, I’m doing a talk at Roguelike Celebration, a conference about the creation, appreciation and analysis of roguelikes; that odd genre of game incorporating procedural generation, permanent consequences (often called permadeath) and maximalist systems. In 2020, I did a short talk on Procedurally Generated Technology Trees. This year, I’m talking about…
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The Aluminum Cat Documentary Released Now!
When you make an interactive show, it’s hard for the audience to tell just *how* interactive it is. This is part of the rare magic of any participatory theatre; even Keith Johnstone said don’t bother trying to convince your audience that a show is improvised, because they’ll never believe you. So we at Escape Character…
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POV Edit: Star War’s Obi-Wan Kenobi
I’ve taken Star Wars I-VI and cut out every scene that Obi-Wan Kenobi didn’t directly witness. I wasn’t trying to make a movie, and the end result has some bumpy transitions, but in the spirit of this upcoming standalone film, I wanted to get to know Obi-Wan Kenobi’s life better. I’m calling this a “POV…
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Studying Narratives in Small Spaces, Part 3: Conversations
At the Augmented & Virtual Reality roundtables at GDC 2015, there was consensus that moving a player through space made them uneasy. While in the future, I’m sure we’ll discover interesting tricks to ease the transition, what if we aren’t worried about that, and instead an entire interactive narrative experience happens in a single space?…
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“What’s the most insane technical thing you did that actually worked?”
Or, How I Fixed A Real-Time Image Transmission Protocol For A Live Event By Making A Numbers Station The evening before the GDC round table panel on Location-Based Stories, I was with most of them in a pub. I ended up here because I’m one-half of Playlines with Rob Morgan, who was on the panel.…
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Questions to Ask after an Underwhelming Art Experience
Is this at 90% of being amazing and needs to be pushed/polished just a little or is it actually at 20% and there’s a ton more work? If it’s a long way from being good, is the path to success clear or unclear? If the extra work to make it good could be put in,…
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NYC Immersive Theatre Review
I finally set aside time over New Year’s to see all the immersive theatre in New York City that people have been bugging me to see. Here’s a terse listing of them all. NOTE: all of those shows are great and worth seeing. With my comments, I’m not trying to convince people to think about…