September 15, 2008

Events at MIT

by Nick Montfort · , 10:00 am

If you’re in or near the Boston area, we have some great events for you at MIT. This semester’s Purple Blurb series at MIT will continue our tradition of great readers and speakers, and will be totally sweet. We have Steve Meretzky (October 6), Jesper Juul (October 27), and Jason Scott (November 17). Details follow later in this post …

Also, check out the Comparative Media Studies Colloquium Series. The speakers include Lev Manovich (November 6) and Grand Text Auto’s very own Michael Mateas (November 20).

Here are the specifics for Purple Blurb:

Steve Meretzky on writing and computer games (32-141)

October 6, 2008 (Monday) 6pm.

Meretzky, an alumnus of MIT, was the most prolific author at the most successful interactive fiction company, Infocom. The work he did there included writing Planetfall, A Mind Forever Voyaging, and Leather Goddesses of Phobos as well as collaborating with Douglas Adams to develop The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Meretzky has worked at Legend Entertainment, Boffo Games, and WorldWinner. He is currently at Blue Fang Games. Note that this event is in the Stata Center, not the Trope Tank.

Jesper Juul on the game High Seas (14N-233)

October 27, 2008 (Monday) 6pm.

Juul is a video game theorist and author of Half Real: Video Games between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds (MIT Press, 2006). He is also a video game developer, and in this capacity he created High Seas, a casual matching-tile game with a narrative frame. Juul is currently a lecturer in the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies; he works at the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab.

Jason Scott on the blog ASCII and textfiles.com (14N-233)

November 17, 2008 (Monday) 6pm.

Scott is a documentary filmmaker whose work includes BBS: The Documentary and a film about interactive fiction, Get Lamp, which is now in post-production. In addition to making films, Scott maintains the main archive of textfiles (plain-text documents) as they appeared on computer bulletin board systems in the 1980s and early 1990s. He also blogs about digital media topics on ASCII.

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