dianafilms

the last express: VG

for the gamers and ex gamers interested in narrative:
http://tinyurl.com/kjud54
This game was so much fun to work on, it felt like we were doing something quite groundbreaking at the time on technical as well as creative levels and in I guess we really were. Jordan's specialty is to take the cinematic elements and to incorporate those into game theory, what a treat it was to watch things evolve!
Still so proud of him, he made this game on spec and I think he did it to make a difference in how games worked. He could have just as easily continued making things like Prince of Persia and Karateka and all that, instead he decided to push the envelope.
Here's to all of us pushing our own envelopes in one way or another.

Social media hype

Traveling Companion Available pay per view or downloads

http://www.girlsshorts.tv/ This new film channel online is dedicated to women directors and their craft. They are just launching this week. Fingers Crossed and Yay Paula! Come and watch this award winning short!

User Generated Content Principles

User Generated Content providers have banded together to establish basic rules of the road.

[Sony/crackle, CBS Corp., Dailymotion, Fox, Microsoft, MySpace, NBC Universal, Veoh, Viacom and Disney.]

I wonder what creative commons has to say on this:

http://www.ugcprinciples.com/

Blu y Muto y Mi Buenos Aires '08

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Storytron from Boing Boing

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/15/storytron_interactiv.html

This is why I love Boing Boing...

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Storytron: Interactive storytelling platform for nontechnical authors
Legendary game designer Chris Crawford has disclosed some information about his next big project, an interactive storytelling platform called Storytron.

I saw a demo of Storytron this weekend, given by sf writer Laura J Mixon (author of the early cyberpunk classic Glass Houses), who's working on the project. It seems like there's a lot of potential there -- it's basically an engine for describing autonomous game-AIs that exist to move a story forward. The toolkit is simpler than learning LISP, but harder than rolling up a quickie avatar in WoW -- the kind of thing you're going to have to care about before you get good enough to see much in the way of results. I think that code examples and libraries of user-created characters can make the hump a little shallower -- but this is a tool for storytelling, and there's no getting around the complexity of that task.

Mixon described her aha moment with the technology -- she'd defined some characters and set out to "play" or "solve" the story they inhabited. She happened upon these little automata, going about their daily round, and then watched slack-jawed as the two characters improved a totally spontaneous argument that made perfect sense in the context of the story she'd set out to "write" in her design, but which she had not anticipated, written, or hinted at. The game took on a life of its own and inserted some reasonably good dramatic fooforaw at just the right moment -- the computer was telling her the story.

Now, that's pretty cool.

CC: I will not claim that it is superior to conventional algorithmic notation. We simply won't know that until people start using it. I'm playing a hunch here. Perhaps the most useful observation is that we don't have to be locked into algebraic notation.
DDJ: How else does SWAT accommodate nontechnical types?

CC: The storybuilder does not get to create types. I create the types. And every [datatype] is color-coded: Booleans are black, actors are blue, quantifiers are purple. I think this is useful for amateur programmers. Another thing: Runtime errors are survivable. It happens by virtue of the design of the system that runtime errors only occur when we are considering an action or changing something, and when that happens, we say it poisons that calculation. This invokes a system called "Poison" that logs it for future reference. "Rehearsal," our testing feature, plays the storyworld one way, adjusts a random number, does a thousand passes, and then presents you with a statistical analysis. You had this many poisoned events. Looping cycles. Thread killers.

Link (via /.)