October 25, 2005
Link Dump
The interesting links keep piling up:
The ongoing Helsinki lecture series “Games and Storytelling” has Gonzalo Frasca as a speaker on November 8, with an interesting talk title: “Mini-games, maxi-storytelling: looking at minigames as a narrative genre”. The previous speaker was Greg Costikyan, talking about “Constraining Interaction to Create Emergent Narrative”. (Reading Greg’s powerpoint slides, this appears to be a design-centric attempt to squeeze another drop of water from the rocks that are today’s AI-light game engines.)
Another European interactive narrative lecture series, sagasnet, is releasing a collection of papers called Developing Interactive Narrative Content, including a (new?) Michael Joyce essay, “Interactive Planes: Toward Post-Hypertextual New Media”.
Game Paused is an upcoming exhibition, book and DVD, still taking submissions, of all forms of art / music / games / what-have-you, inspired or motivated by the history of videogames.
Continuing our Nintendogs thread: a good essay analyzing the game-ness and explicit player rewards built into Nintendogs, illustrating how it advances the virtual pet concept.
Here’s a decent essay and survey of various visual styles in games, called “Videogame Aesthetics: The Future!”
Finally, on the indie game front: a candid interview with the lead designer of the critically-acclaimed Darwinia, whose game seems to leave American publishers uninterested; and Steve Ince reacting to an Adventure Gamers discussion that debates the $20 pricepoint of Bone. And Greg Costikyan in BusinessWeek on his startup Manifesto Games as “the Miramax of indie games”.
November 17th, 2005 at 10:34 am
Copter – Really cool 1980s style flash game where you fly a copter… avoid crashing!