"Introducing Choose Your Own Adventure eBooks for the iBookstore.  10 titles now available in our ground-breaking electronic format:

CYOA has been in digital format since just a few years after it was first printed, appearing on Atari and Commodore computer systems in the very early 1980s.  We've improved the electronic experience a little bit:

Touch-screen technology lets us keep the interactive experience compelling and immersive.  And because you can't keep your fingers in a digital page, we've added a colorful map that lets you skip around and ahead in the book.  It's not cheating, we swear!

If you have an iTunes account, head over and check us out.  You'll need an iPad or iPhone with iBooks 1.5 or later (it's free!) and iOS 5.0 or later.  As always, we'd love to hear what you think."

[via: http://nofilmschool.com/2012/02/advice-creating-transmedia-documentary/ via Thomas Steele-Maley]

[Made with Klynt: http://www.klynt.net/ ]

[Related Bear 71: http://bear71.nfb.ca ]

"Edit Rich Narratives
*Mixed Media Editing: Texts, images, audios, videos and hyperlinks
*Multiple Interactive Layers: Manage unlimited story nodes
*Visual Storyboard: Edit your storyboard like a mind map

Connect Your Story To The Web
*Mash-up Ready: Mix YouTube videos and FlickR images
*Facebook & Twitter Friendly: Share your favorite sequences on social networks
*Custom Maps: Geolocalize your content

Publish Anywhere
*Quick Publishing: Automatically export your final edit
*Embedable Anywhere: Show your program on any webpage
*Tablet and Mobile Device Compatible: iOS player available this Spring"

[See this project example "Journey to the End of Coal": http://www.honkytonk.fr/index.php/webdoc/ ]
[Related: http://nofilmschool.com/2012/02/advice-creating-transmedia-documentary/ ]
[See also Bear 71: http://bear71.nfb.ca ]

[an interactive film about grizzly bears from the National Film Board of Canada]

"It's hard to say where the wild world ends and the wild one begins."

"The forest has its own language."

"If you look backward from any single point in time, everything seems to lead up to that moment."

"They'll have to learn *not* to do what comes naturally, and I wonder. Maybe the lesson is too hard."

"…early 1980s, an entire industry rose over telling of tales, solving of intricate puzzles & art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to readers, & then invited them to live w/in them.

They were called "computer adventure games", & they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.

Rising from side projects at unis & engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, & then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks & traps to be overcome. They were filled w/ suspense, humor & sadness. & they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate obstacles & think their way to victory. These players have carried memories of these text adventures to the modern day, & whole new generation of authors have taken up torch to present new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them."

"This interactive documentary blurs the line between wild and wired worlds"

"It’s usually a good thing when technology and creativity intersect, and that’s why it’s so easy to love projects like Bear 71, which surpasses everything I previously believed was possible to do with a documentary.

Produced by the National Film Board of Canada’s digital studio, the documentary is constructed as an interactive online experience that observes and records the intersection of humans, nature and technology.

The story follows a female grizzly bear, named Bear 71 by the park rangers who track her. The bear’s story speaks to how we coexist with wildlife in an age of networks, surveillance and digital information, and blurs the line between the wild and wired worlds."

"The ur-game for computers — Adventure — was originally written by Will Crowther in 1975 and greatly extended by Don Woods in 1976. I have taken Woods’s original FORTRAN program for Adventure Version 1.0 and recast it in the CWEB idiom.

I remember being fascinated by this game when John McCarthy showed it to me in 1977. I started with no clues about the purpose of the game or what I should do; just the computer’s comment that I was at the end of a forest road facing a small brick building. Little by little, the game revealed its secrets, just as its designers had cleverly plotted. What a thrill it was when I first got past the green snake! Clearly the game was potentially addictive, so I forced myself to stop playing — reasoning that it was great fun, sure, but traditional computer science research is great fun too, possibly even more so.

Now here I am, 21 years later, returning to the great Adventure after having indeed had many exciting adventures in Computer Science"

"had a fun Twitter back-and-forth…about Dungeons & Dragons…made me think about a few things:

* Board games like HeroQuest, which offered a sort of stripped-down D&D experience, played across a reconfigurable plastic-and-cardboard labyrinth.

* The fact that my friend +Robert Lavolette seems to enjoy the sourcebooks (detailing various monsters, locales, & lost civilizations) more than the games themselves.

* +Matt Penniman's love of new-school indie RPGs, many of which sport radically reduced rule sets—you can play some w/ just index cards.

So: What's the future of offline role-playing games?

Is the rise of a game like Settlers of Catan a sign that the mainstream is ready for nerdier fare? If there was going to be a breakout RPG (one played in person, around a table) what would it be? Do you have a dream RPG?

I'm interested to hear from folks who haven't played RPGs—who know them by reputation, or who have always been curious…"

"Your sensitivity & tolerance improve only with practice. I wish I’d been given toy businesses to play w/ at school, just as playing w/ crayons taught my body how to let me draw.

I’ve written in these weeknotes before how I manage three budgets: cash, attention, risk. This is my attempt to explain how I feel about risk, and to trace the pathways between risk and cash. Attention, & how it connects, can wait until another day…

I said I wouldn’t speak about attention, but here’s a sneak peak of what I would say. Attention is the time of people in the studio, & how effectively it is applied. It is affected by the arts of project & studio management; it can be tracked by time-sheets & capacity plans; it can be leveraged with infrastructure, internal tools, and carefully grown tacit knowledge; and it magically grows when there’s time to play, when there is flow in the work, and when a team aligns into a “sophisticated work group.”
Attention is connected to cash through work."

"augmented reality could be an important component of a new kind of storytelling, making today's 3D entertainments as dated as silent films. Elan Lee's Fourth Wall Studios is already chipping away at barrier between storytelling & daily life. The 1st augmented reality entertainments may be text based rather than video; eventually they will likely be as immersive as my dream.

"Every six months or so it seems as if the entire Internet discovers for the first time that people are making data visualizations of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were popular in the early eighties. Computer scientist Christian Swinehart’s stunning visualizations are only the most recent to capture the imagination of scores of old fans, academics, and data fanatics.

"Of all the various Choose Your Own Adventure-type books, the Fighting Fantasy series, created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, was by far and away my favorite. I read/played them all, obsessively. They felt more like games than any of the others (and included a simple D&D-esque dice-based combat system), but were also much better written, better typeset, and better illustrated. Rather than going by pages, they went by numbered entries, generally with more than one entry per page. Most of the books had exactly 400 entries, so the gameplay was vastly more complex than any of the regular CYOB-style books. I’d love to see info-graphic diagrams of their decision trees a la the work by Christian Swinehart I linked to yesterday."

[more: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/11/13/fighting-fantasy-flowcharts ]

"To get a sense for the distribution of pages within the actual cyoa books, I’ve prepared a dataset of 12 books. They earliest date from 1979 and at the later edge are a handful from 1986. They are laid out chronologically (or according to series order for books released in the same year) with the oldest at the top left and more recent books below. Each book has been arranged into rows of ten pages apiece."