earthx.org blog

Just found it… “Can Grand Theft Auto Inspire Professors?” by Scott Carlson.

Also, Game Research.

Just came across this old writeup in the New York Times from J.M. Coetzee on his time here in Austin.

Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986.

Pavel starts from previous understandings of fiction that center atomically on the truth-value of characters, events, and utterances, and points out the limitations of defining fiction on that granular a level — instead, he argues for an understanding of fictional worlds, “…a model that represents the users’ understanding of fiction once they step inside it and more or less lose touch with the physical realm” (16).

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… wasn’t the most entertaining movie in itself — the battle for Zion was about ten minutes too long — but it did everything I expected it to do.

Via Ludology comes this very funny EGM article where game-literate kids of today play games from the past.

Some discussion on Slate concerning Second Life, a persistent world game with a very minimal narrative structure and MOO-style player agency, including authorship. I’m trying to suss out Second Life as a fictional space and figure out what distinguishes a game narrative from a stylized digital space, or whether I’m thinking about it too much in binaries.

The review of the persistent world game Real Life is helpful in this situation.

Very piqued by these responses on genre-specific implementations of genre-agnostic game functions on Nicholas Yee’s Daedalus Project site.

So the Metacortechs (Matrix) alternate reality game reveals, as a clue, a package of binary files which, upon decoding to ASCII, reveal a narrative of a meeting between one of the ARG protagonists (Beth, who works at Metacortex) and a strange figure. From the strange figure’s point of view. In XML.

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