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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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Taekwondo does not support Double-Jumping
I started Taekwondo in November 2018. I’ve wanted to try a martial art for years, but it’s been one of those hobbies in the backlog that required a chance encounter to nucleate. I used to do more cardio and cognitive intensive physical activities: gymnastics, figure skating and parkour (amateurishly), but the last few years have…
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Player Character Bios in Participatory Media
Originally published in Escape Character’s Newsletter. Question: What’s the best way to hack someone who’s never LARP’d[1] before to get into character? Our goal here is to have the player buy into the stakes of the show before they cross the threshold [2] into the space of the show. In Escape Character’s projects where the…
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Novel FTL Flavour Profiles
Ways faster-than-light travel could be fun, while also trying to solve Fermi Paradox. 1. It’s actually hard to go slow. I’m going to call this a Tachyon Drive approach. Once you spin up a tachyon drive, you actually go infinitely fast, and it takes precision and energy to slow the heck down. Most of the…
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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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Books Read 2018
The year’s best books: Live from New York and Hugh Cook’s Wizard War ________ Gardens of the Moon – Steven Erikson – Jan 1, 2018 Starfish – Peter Watts – Jan 3, 2018 The Glass Castle – Jeanette Walls – Jan 24, 2018 Surface Detail – Iain M. Banks – Feb 17, 2018 Steal the…
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Breaking Up With Git LFS
After using Git LFS on and off for over two years, even going through one major version change, I’ve decided git LFS is not for me, at this stage. Here’s how I took an existing repo using Git LFS, and removed it to return to a vanilla Git repo. Briefly, Git LFS is a way…
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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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Deep Fryosleep
(a summary of a drunken conversation from last night) For the voyage across the stars, deep freezing is bad for most biological organisms. Ice crystals, when they form at the microscopic level, can pierce and break cell walls. Animals that endure deep cold and space successfully[0] do so by removing all the moisture from their…
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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?…