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Effective Playtesting Rituals
Every community of creators should have a regular playtest series. This is true whether it’s an ad-hoc community of independent creators, an academic research group, or a large corporation. If there isn’t a playtest series, you should start one. This post is for you. I have been involved in several recurring playtest series. I first…
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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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Telepresence Immersive Theatre with Mice instead of Voice
This past year at Escape Character has been quiet, but very busy. Me + several collaborators have been iterating on telepresence interactive theatre. We have written and debuted three scenarios and are in the middle of writing our fourth. We’ve put on in-person shows in San Francisco, Toronto and London. We just started remote invite-only…
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Wonderful Projects I Did With Microsoft’s Kinect
RIP the Kinect. Literally changed the direction of my research/career/life/art. Gave it more DEPTH. — Dustin FreemanšLAX (@dustinfreeman) October 25, 2017 Microsoft has ceased manufacturing the Kinect. Here’s some projects, art and research, academic and industrial, that I could only have done with the Kinect. The Role of Physical Controllers in Motion Video Gaming, 2011:…
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Immersive Theatre Roundup: D&D Yoga
Yesterday, I saw/experienced the show “D&D Yoga”, in the Toronto Fringe Festival. This is a literal combination these two things, which worked in some surprising ways, didn’t work in some surprising ways. It is a yoga class, run by a real-life yoga instructor Christine Desrochers, during which you go on an actual Dungeons and Dragons…
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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, Iām sure weāll discover interesting tricks to ease the transition, what if we arenāt 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, Iām sure weāll discover interesting tricks to ease the transition, what if we arenāt worried about that, and instead an entire interactive narrative experience happens in a single space?…
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Appears to Take on Meaning…
Iām 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 Iāve had in my life to this date. Some of my spare thoughts that donāt appear in that formal academic document will appear here. Humans are…
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Improv Remix Dailies
Inspired by The Wooster Group, we’re going to start making dailies for each day* leading up to the showcase. Below are the first two! Check Twitter or my YouTube channel for more as they come out. * Not absolutely every day.
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Players are Jerks to NPCs in Real Life, Too
A non-player character (NPC) is anyone you encounter in a game who is not a player themselves. They are controlled by the game, whether a human game/dungeon master or a computer simulation. Player characters (PCs), the in-game characters controlled by the players, are notoriously abusive to NPCs. Since the universe exists and moves forward for…