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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 […]
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IRL Deviations from Snow Crash and The Diamond Age
ADDED POST-US-ELECTION UPDATE AT BOTTOM I first read Neal Stephenson’s duology of future cyber/* punk novels Snow Crash and The Diamond Age a decade ago. As my personal aspirations increasingly resemble some of the elements in the novel, I’ve given them a re-read. I especially want to look how the future in the novels resembles […]
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Game Mechanic Compression Ratio
After attending a conference on roguelikes over the weekend, I was talking with friend Randy Lubin about how players move from learning rules to playing a game. We discovered/invented this really cool concept: Game Mechanics Compression Ratio: the ratio between the initial instructions for a game once understood cognitively, and the complexity that they create […]
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Bungie’s Destiny and Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
After a year hiatus, I played through much of Destiny recently. The production design is high-quality good. The writing is maybe good. The presentation is terrible. I’m a fan of the subtle out-of-order storytelling in the Dark Souls series. It seems Destiny tried to do the same, except ignored the subtlety, so every piece of […]
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Studying Narratives in Small Spaces, Part 2: Boats
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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Studying Narratives in Small Spaces, Part 1: Mysteries
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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An Illustrating Example of Improv
I’m finalizing my PhD Thesis on interaction design for improv. This is a slightly-embellished example of something that actually happened. Yes, a mouse ran across the stage in the middle of an improv set and the performers all reacted in different ways and my mind exploded in curiosity watching it unfold. Here is a example […]
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Books that Stuck with Me
I meant to assemble ten (10) works of fiction or non-fiction that had been influential to me at some point. This proved hard, and for a while I tried to rank them so I could eliminate any 11+. I settled on splitting my life thus far into 3 periods: Childhood, Adolescence and Adulthood, and the […]
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Appears to Take on Meaning…
I’m in the midst of writing up my thesis, an unnaturally large document that I both want to just finish, but also have the urge to encapsulate every thought I’ve had in my life to this date. Some of my spare thoughts that don’t appear in that formal academic document will appear here. Humans are […]