I’ve been enjoying the summer movie blockbusters, more or less, and have been struck by a couple that veer off in a decidedly metaphysical direction. And you won’t be surprised to hear that I’ve spent a while thinking about the last few scenes of one film in particular, which may rewrite or redefine the entire [...]
Filed under: character, geek culture, humour, meme, narrative, old media, storytelling on August 25th, 2010 | 2 Comments »
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the Difference Engine no.3 edition) is now available for download exclusively from e23, the digital warehouse of Steve Jackson Games. This is the revised and expanded facsimile version of the game that I’ve been blathering about for the last two years, and which is finally seeing the light of [...]
Filed under: cake, casual games, game design, history of games, humour, magnum opus press, storytelling, tabletop on August 5th, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Update on the new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is to be released in September:— The first thousand copies of the book will be of the deluxe-format Gentleman’s Edition (black leather-effect cover with gold embossing), suitable for reading, prominent display in your library, and hurling at inattentive pot-boys. The remainder of [...]
Filed under: humour, magnum opus press, munchausen, rpg, storytelling, tabletop on July 25th, 2008 | 12 Comments »
If you’ve been commenting to my last few blog posts on the World of Warcraft, or you have a scientific hypothesis of your own about the nature of Azeroth and how it came to be that way, or you have too much time on your hands and enjoy thinking about stuff that doesn’t make sense, [...]
Filed under: fantasy, game design, game philosophy, geek culture, geophysics, google, humour, information use, meme, mmorpg, online games, playfulness, science, storytelling, world of warcraft on July 4th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A couple of years back I wrote an essay on games that create a story as part of the gameplay, which was published as part of the excellent collection Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2007) which I have huckstered here before. The contents of the book [...]
Filed under: Second Person, board games, card games, family games, folklore, game design, narrative, storytelling, tabletop, travel, writing on February 7th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
…may very well be hexagonal. The cat is not fully out of the bag yet, but I think we are finally at a stage where we can admit there is a cat and a bag, and the two are in proximity, and the cat is very much alive. Not so much Schrödinger’s cat as Humdinger’s. Also, look out for a very interesting ARG-related announcement [...]
Filed under: ARG, business, charity, event, game design, narrative, personal, storytelling, street games on September 28th, 2007 | No Comments »
So I played the demo of Bioshock a few days ago and I was all like, “huh,” enough to put my money down on a pre-order but not, you know, entirely convinced. Game play, atmosphere, setting and backstory, fantastic, but there was one thing that really jarred. And then I read an internest discussion that [...]
Filed under: character, fps, narrative, oh for fuck's sake, storytelling, survival horror on August 24th, 2007 | 6 Comments »
Do you ever have that thing where you can remember a snippet of a lyric but you have no idea what the rest of the words are, or what the song was? I do too, but with me it’s folktales. If you can identify the folktales these two incidents come from, I would be profoundly [...]
Filed under: folklore, lazyweb, storytelling on June 21st, 2007 | 4 Comments »
Wired has suddenly got a bee under its bonnet about the idea that video games need a critical vocabulary before they can begin to be any good, or at least taken seriously. Annalee Newitz argues that film didn’t flower till the 1940s and it was the publication of French film-crit magazine Cahiers du Cinema in [...]
Filed under: criticism, game design, game philosophy, narrative, old media, rpg, storytelling, tabletop on June 2nd, 2007 | 3 Comments »
Spurred by a note from Gareth Hanrahan, I’ve been thinking about tracking down all the James Branch Cabell novels I’m missing. Cabell, for the uninitiated, is one of the greatest fantasy writers of the twentieth century. While Lovecraft and Howard were hanging out with Howard and Lovecraft, Cabell was hobnobbing with Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis [...]
Filed under: fantasy, fiction, history of games, mmorpg, old media, rpg, storytelling on June 2nd, 2007 | No Comments »