"In a market where books and games are close rivals for the most popular category on app stores, what happens when today's new gamers are hungry for something more than word puzzles?"

"Gamers are hungry for deeper characterization and worlds to which they can truly attach, and text can be a way to illuminate inner worlds, thought processes or other elements that aren't easily demonstrated by imagery."

"…a unique interactive platform that allows kids & parents to read & play together. We don't want to just add interactive elements to books. We want to build from the ground up a new type of book. Kids are going to experience books not just on the pages in front of them but all around them. They're gonna be able to interact with the characters & become a character in the story. The videos that they watch online, the messages that they're gonna get in their inbox, the games that they play are all going to relate to the story as it's happening and they are going to be a part of it. We are talking about a collaboration. It's going to be the author who wrote the story, the parent who controls and customizes the story and then the child who experiences the story. These books are gonna be immersive, not disruptive."

[Quote is caption to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2ZMhLh7aME ]

"Choice of Games is a small partnership dedicated to producing high-quality, text-based, multiple-choice games. We produce games in house, beginning with Choice of the Dragon and Choice of Broadsides. We have also developed a simple scripting language for writing text-based games, ChoiceScript, which we make available to others for use in their projects, and we host games produced by other designers using ChoiceScript on our website. All of our games are available for free on the web. We also produce mobile versions of our games that can be played on iPhones, Android phones, and other smartphones."

"Penumbra is a hybrid art/literature application in development for tablet media. It expands “ebook” conventions by carefully integrating video, illustration and fiction. These media work equally together to inform the total reading. Tablets are a promising literary medium with the potential to redefine our reading practice beyond a simple emulation of print on screen. Increasingly, ebooks could represent a growing platform for the consumption and dissemination of media art: a platform that is inherently interactive and readily mobile.

Investment in actively reading the interface relies on our experience with interaction design; the goal is to implement touch-screen gestures in service of the story’s content. Touching and tilting the screen places the reader in the position of the main protagonist. The reader can use the interface to decide how long the protagonist focuses on his external vs. internal world."

"Thoreau…“With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,” he proclaimed, “all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike.”

Blow clicked off the stereo and turned to me. “I honestly didn’t plan that,” he said.

In so many words, Loud Thoreau had just described Blow’s central idea for The Witness. Whereas so many contemporary games are built on a foundation of shooting or jumping or, let’s say, the creative use of mining equipment to disembowel space zombies, Blow wants the point of The Witness to be the act of noticing, of paying attention to one’s surroundings. Speaking about it, he begins to sound almost like a Zen master. “Things are pared down to the basic acts of movement and observation until those senses become refined,” he told me. “The further you go into the game, the more it’s not even about the thinking mind anymore—it becomes about the intuitive mind."

[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 ]

“I just got my Weegee + Barthes + Chris Alexander + IF + symbolic logic + narratology fancies tickled at once.” —Max Fenton at 2/19/12 7:39 PM

(Source: http://twitter.com/maxfenton/status/171393503849488384)

[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"

"A visual novel (ビジュアルノベル bijuaru noberu?) is an interactive fiction game featuring mostly static graphics, usually with anime-style art, or occasionally live-action stills or video footage.[1] As the name might suggest, they resemble mixed-media novels or tableau vivant stage plays.

In Japanese terminology, a distinction is often made between visual novels proper (abbreviated NVL), which are predominantly narrative and have very little interactive elements, and adventure games (abbreviated AVG or ADV), which typically incorporate problem-solving and other gameplay elements. This distinction is normally lost in the West, where both NVLs and ADVs are commonly referred to as "visual novels" by Western fans. Visual novels and ADVs are especially prevalent in Japan, where they made up nearly 70% of the PC game titles released in 2006."

"The story of Steins;Gate takes place in Akihabara and is about a group of friends who have customized their microwave into a device that can send text messages to the past. As they perform different experiments, an organization named SERN who has been doing their own research on time travel tracks them down and now the characters have to find a way to avoid being captured by them. Steins;Gate has been praised for its intertwining storyline and the voice actors have been commended for their portrayal of the characters."

"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."

"I was completely blown away by this video the first time through. Such a simple, low-tech, solution produces such an amazingly rich, engaging experience that’s just bursting with possibility for further creativity.

"Frotz.activity lets you play interactive fiction games on your XO laptop. This activity is a wrapper around the Unix port of Frotz, which is an interpreter for Infocom games and other Z-machine games. It includes one game, the classic Adventure. You can download more games here: Frotz/Games." ... "Frotz.activity is free software, licensed under the GPL and so is the actual frotz interpreter. You can find the source code to the wrapper inside the .xo bundle. Source for the interpreter can be found on David Griffith's website: http://frotz.homeunix.org/frotz/ If you are interested in a python z-machine implementation see: http://code.google.com/p/zvm/ "

[more here: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Frotz/Games]

"The Colossal Cave Adventure game, produced in the '70s, was the historic first "interactive fiction" game, in which the computer would simulate and describe a situation and the user would type in what to do next, in simple English.

"Frotz was a verb in MIT slang, meaning "to play with" or "to manipulate". This presumably led to its use in certain Infocom games."

"Do you love stories? Do they excite you, fascinate you, exhilarate you? Have you ever wanted to try to jump right into a story and speak to the people in it? Have you thought about playing the protagonist, letting your feelings and imagination steer the story in new, creative directions?" via: http://pmog.com/missions/a_sampler_platter_of_interactive_fiction

"Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, describes software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives and as computer games. In common usage, the word refers to text adventures, a type of adventure game with text-based input and output. The term is sometimes used to encompass the entirety of the medium, but is also sometimes used to distinguish games produced by the interactive fiction community from those created by games companies. It can also be used to distinguish the more modern style of such works, focusing on narrative and not necessarily falling into the adventure game genre at all, from the more traditional focus on puzzles. More expansive definitions of interactive fiction may refer to all adventure games, including wholly graphical adventures such as Myst."