October 12, 2009

The Full Hack

Some of the best times of my life were weekends spent filming movie previews with my Pure West buddies. We'd make our own two minute versions of the films we wished existed, mocking every genre we could reach along the way.

I'm still out here, but they have continued the grand tradition with Full Hack. A story of winners, losers, lovers, and minature beanbags. Check it out!

October 2, 2009

Peanut Gallery, Assemble

peanutlogo_FINAL.png

With the start of Indiecade, Andre, RJ, John and I have officially formed The Peanut Gallery. By our powers combined, we will make Awesome!

Here's our site: http://www.peanutgallerygames.com

And collectively, we have two games at Indiecade this weekend... Minor Battle and Spectre! Come check them out!

September 24, 2009

Spectre: Free Download/Indiecade

Two bits of news, equally exciting!

The first is that Spectre, which some of you may have seen at last year's IMD thesis show, is now available as a Mac or PC download, free of charge.

The second is that we'll be showing the game at Indiecade next week!

If you want to know more about the game (or the amazing team of IMD students that made it happen) , we have a newly minted website: http://www.spectregame.com. Download Spectre, try it out, leave a comment with your thoughts! I've also included a trailer below the fold.

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August 14, 2009

Second Skin - Tonight and All This Week

Second Skin, a documentary on hardcore MMO gamers, is coming to Los Angeles for a one week theatrical run, starting tonight!

Thanks to some help from me and a few other friends, the director, Juan Carlos Pineiro, has driven (that's right, DRIVEN) out from New York to attend the LA premiere. He's going to be holding a Q&A at the Friday shows, and probably some of the Saturday shows as well. I'll be there at the 9:30 show tonight (Friday) if anyone wants to meet up.

Buy tickets online here.

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June 11, 2009

Requiem for the A Button

Controllers (from Kotaku)

At E3 2009, Microsoft unleashed a demon.

A week has gone by, and for most of us the words Project Natal already mean something. In case they don't, let me try to sum it up: it's a game platform where you don't need a controller. You just sit (or stand) in front of the screen, and move, and things happen.

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May 9, 2009

The Thesis Show!!

May 9-15, 2009

Full details at http://interactive.usc.edu/thesis2009.

March 20, 2009

All Your Games are RPGs

This is a sneaky way to get some feedback on my thesis paper: I'm posting section one to the blog. This first part runs through a lite history of interactive narrative, and argues that role-playing games form the dominant paradigm for almost all our interactive stories. I've taken out the footnotes for your reading sanity... but everthing else is intact. What do you think? Is this readable? Sensical? Rife with grammatical no-no's? Read! Discuss! Please???

***
Joseph Wheeler has lived a full life… seventy-three long, strange years lay behind him. With time, however, his memory has thinned, and now he can only remember a few fleeting moments. Spectre is a new interactive narrative that explores this character’s experiences, and uses play to examine the idea that no one “story” can do a person justice.

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February 4, 2009

Hyperland

I came across this gem while researching Hypertext for my paper... a naive, hilarious and wonderful view of Interactive Media circa 1990. Leave it to Douglas Adams to get it so wrong, yet so right.

If it's all getting little too linear for you, try skipping around... I guarantee you'll encounter some classic out-of-context BBC action.

January 18, 2009

Happy New Year / Spectre Trailer

Well, the winter break is over... and as Matt Korba pointed out, it's likely to be the last school vacation of my life. I'm ready for this last semester, ready to move on to other things, but the notion of graduation always makes me a little misty-eyed.

But while school may be coming to an end for me, Spectre is just starting to come into its own. We have two things to announce: first, the Spectre website is live... go to http://www.spectregame.com and check it out! Sean's done some great work for the site, including images, team bios and a forum. The download section is quiet for now, but that will change soon enough.

In addition, I just finished cutting the first Spectre trailer. Check it out:

If you have comments on either the site or the trailer, leave them below!

December 2, 2008

Since Last Time / Asterix Overload

This is just one of those lazy blog entries to let you know I'm still more or less alive.

Two weeks of game revision, unpacking*, Fallout 3 and tryptophan (not necessarily in that order) have left me feeling well-rested and massively out of shape. I hope to remedy both these issues shortly: there will be plenty of exercise and exhaustion in the next few December weeks as we update our game for IGF.

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