Beached out of Age
Posted: February 17, 2016 Filed under: Fiction, Uncategorized | Tags: Architect of Experience, Beached, Beached out of Age, Humanity, Narrative, Short Story, Story, Trilobite, Trilobites, Writing Leave a commentThe trees on this seaside bluff arched like ribs, sheltering an old house that overlooked the North Atlantic. I drove through the rain and my tires slipped and spun through the mud. I eventually made it past the gate and up the long driveway to the house. It seemed much larger in the distance but from the front steps looked like a miniature victorian mansion. From the driveway I could see down the bluff and to the rocky beach below, stretching out into the rain in both directions. The long lines of rolling waves were interrupted only by a rock just below the house that stretched into the waves.
Emergent Narrative and Encouraging Emergent Play
Posted: November 10, 2015 Filed under: Art, Fiction, NonFiction, Story, Uncategorized | Tags: Architect of Experience, Art, Blog, Challenge, Dame Developtment, Emergent, Essay, Gamedev, Gaming, Narrative, Narrative Design, Story, Writing 2 CommentsGames have two different kinds of narratives: Explicit and Emergent. Explicit Narrative is the story that the game tells to the player, and Emergent Narrative is the story the player creates for themselves as they play the game.
Perhaps the most noticeable game featuring Emergent Play is Minecraft, which sold to Microsoft for 2.5 billion dollars. Since then, Sandbox and Survival games have taken off, generating countless titles, almost all of which are Early Access, only a few of which will ever see completion.
Any time you get your player to say: “I Did ______ in [Insert Game Name]” then you have created Emergent Play [EP].
How do you get your player to put themselves in the place of their avatar? How do you encourage them to make decisions and create their own Narrative?
Flash Fiction #1
Posted: September 27, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Art, Fiction, Flash, Flash Fiction, Narrative, Story, Writing Leave a commentA broken molar scrapes the inside of my lip. Teeth once coddled by an orthondotist are now caught in pieces between my molars and my gums. When you’re in stunning pain its hard not to grit your teeth.
Oh the pain,
What fantastic pleasure,
What life-giving fucking ecstasy.
Blood pumps past my ears to the ball of hate in between. The animal in there snarls and bites but I wipe the blood from my lips and get up. I tried to spit a tooth out, but instead I dribble out shattered fragments of my head.
I got back up.
I fucking got back up.
He was fist bumping his friends as I staggered. I tried to summon words and found only blood. I wiped again, red streaks on the back of my arm. As the blood dried it pulled the hairs from their roots, one by one. A whisper of pain against the roar of the rest.
“You want more?” He yelled. His neutered jackals laughed as their Mussolini flexed. I knew I could die today, I knew he didn’t care. He walks back over to me like his dick is scraping the floor: one half menace, the other creatine.
Me: “Yes Please”
See, he has this moment of lovely doubt. He sees something in me, he sees that whatever pain I’m in is pale and wrinkled in comparison to what’s left under my fingernails.
Blood, left long enough, passes well for dirt.
I stare him down for a beat before his sleeve-lacking lackeys egg him on. “Fuck him up” they say, like I don’t want to get fucked. “Kill the Faggot” they say, like I’ve never tried
“Come on!” I’d already swallowed or spat the blood so the only thing left in my throat was grit. I beckoned him forward, “Let’s get my dick hard”
“Oh, you like this, freak?” His veiny satellites jeer and he laughs. I was back in the schoolyard, gravel in my knees and filled with spite. Here is my revenge.
I dribble out another bloody fragment of tooth that had dislodged itself from my gums. So I told him: “Let’s turn this into a hate crime”
And boy, did we.
Three minutes or an hour went by. He only lasted a few more punches before he resorted to kicking me, curled on the pavement. I think I took the punches better than he did.
But soon they got bored.
They always do.
They walked away thinking they’d won.
The entire world soon shrunk to contain only me, my pain, and a night sky that stretched from the roof of one building to another. Stars outnumbered by blinking planes.
Pain shot up my side, blinking planes now outnumbered by swimming static. It took a second before I realized: thats what laughing feels like now.
The moment wasn’t lost on me.
This is my revenge against the world. My first and final act of retribution. This is how I get out of bed, this is how I will myself to live. Bloody and beaten, too tired beyond my years with still too little of my life lived.
I stood the fuck up.
I stood up, and I staggered the fuck away.
Mapping Interactive Narrative
Posted: August 21, 2015 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Academic, Accepted, Action, Architect of Experience, Art, Challenge, Conditional, Critic, Critique, Game Developtment, Gamedev, Games, Gaming, Interactive, Narrative, Narrative Design, Objective, Video, Video Games Leave a commentA few months ago I started working on the Narrative Design for a game called Eons Lost, currently in development by 3 Halves Games. Though Narrative Design was not initially an area of writing I gave much consideration, it ended up taking over my brain, and I want to share with you my methodology in approaching it.
Interactive Narrative is a consistent pattern of Objective and Reward.
The following diagrams are the first element in the methodology I am using to design the narrative of Eons Lost. I started with the basics: How do you organize Interactive Narrative?
Walküre Excerpt #4
Posted: August 17, 2015 Filed under: Fiction | Tags: American, Americans, Architect of Experience, Art, Challenge, Civilization, Critique Leave a comment1918, Fall, Belgium Front, Edie
The little one insisted on giving us nicknames, but I told him that if he insisted on calling me Nan one more time I’d punch his stomach right through his anus. Then the Priest came out with an eyebrow gushing like a mountain spring for getting in a bar fight with a gunner from the next outpost over. I told him a Chaplain shouldn’t fight, and he told me to go fuck myself. The big one spent this time saying nothing, looking out into the darkness with his Springfield’s scope for a German light to shoot. My husband would have loved these people, which is the only thing that kept me from hating them.
War is boring and tiring. Two months to this foxhole and Seven days in it so far. The big one has fired 23 shots so far and is unsure if any have hit. The little one cheers him on, “24 Germans!” to which the big one says, “Why 24? I’ve only fired 23 shots” and the little one says, “Yeah, but one of them got two.” “How do you know that?” “Math”.
They carry on like that while the priest drinks from a flask and I write.
I don’t know much about them yet and haven’t bothered to remember their names. I know when they look at me all they see is a small woman with a Machete on her back and a trench knife in her boot. None of them have made a move on me, but I suspect the priest will break first.
What God, Chapter 7
Posted: June 18, 2015 Filed under: Fiction, Story, What God | Tags: Architect of Experience, Excerpt, God, Narrative, Novel, Story, What, What God Leave a comment[Chapter 6, for those who want it]
Chapter 7
In a city as large as this there are AA meetings every night of the week spread between the campuses and churches and community centers. Somehow I found myself at one of those, still holding onto Kraden’s death threats. It was close to dark and I had been driving around looking for a nice quiet bar to have a nice quiet scotch in while I waited for the first round of blood tests to come in. I don’t know why I walked in here but I took advantage of the coffee at the side of the room and sat as far from the stage as possible. I started flipping through the threats.
12 letters. 5 of them had long essays, innocuous little phrases like “Someone should kill you” or “one day you will get whats coming”. These would barely trip our radar, and were likely overactive retirees who were angry that Kraden had had no plan to open the factories back up. a few more were postcards with a picture of Kraden or his family and crosshairs painted over. These are more serious, but too vague to be actionable. I kept flipping through. One of these is not like the others: Long angry letters, implied threats, and one crumpled sheet of waterlogged notebook paper that said, “What happened to Icarus. I want to meet her” It didn’t sound like a death threat, but why was it treated like one by Kraden. I was just examining the return envelope when I realized it had gone quiet.
“Can you hear me back there? Would you like to come and introduce yourself?”
I didn’t look at who had spoken, I just mumbled some excuse and looked at my wrist like it had a watch on it then left quickly.
I sat in my car. The handwriting looked similar to the pad, but was smoother. The letter itself had been crumpled and smoothed flat many times, probably by Kraden. Most of the letters only showed the wear and tear of the postal service, but this one was special.
I started my drive back to the precinct, stopping in a liquor store to grab a bottle of whiskey. This much coffee in me and I’d need some sleep.
I got back, checked on the blood test and was thrown out of the lab by Julian. I then went and grabbed the pad from forensics. I came back up to the office, set my whiskey on the desk and sat down
Side by side the two looked similar. I would send them off to get analyzed anyways, but I was certain of the link. The pad was shakier, but that made sense. Whoever wrote it pulled someone apart limb from limb afterwards. They wouldn’t have been calm
I leaned back and the next thing I knew it was morning.
We Almost Didn’t Go To Space
Posted: June 13, 2015 Filed under: Article, NonFiction, Story | Tags: 1946, 1947, American, Architect of Experience, Challenge, Civilization, Clyde T Holliday, Earth, Galaxy, Picture, Space, Space Race, Universe, V2, World War 2, ww2 Leave a commentIn October, 1946, a small group of scientists rode a jeep out into the desert to where a V2 Rocket had come crashing down from the edge of space. On any other day they would have been examining the wreckage, taking notes, all work to develop an American missile that was more accurate and more deadly than the German V2.
But today was different. Today what they wanted was a small roll of undeveloped film in an iron box designed to survive a 62 mile fall. In that box was the first picture taken from space.
Walküre, Excerpt #3
Posted: December 29, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, Story, Uncategorized | Tags: Architect of Experience, Art, Blog, Critic, Critique, Excerpt, Experience, Humor, Humour, Narrative, Thinking, Walkure, Writing Leave a commentAn excerpt from the journal of Ezekial
Summer, 1934, North Carolina.
“Well fuck a sheep thats a nice bit of stonework there.” She wiped her forehead with a gloved hand leaving a granite streak a mile wide, admiring her work. “You got a little something there on your forehead miss” I was trying to be helpful, something I should probably stop doing.
“You call me miss again and I’ll tear you a new anus with a steam-powered masonry drill- And what’s this I conveniently have at my side? What could that possibly be-“
“It’s a masonry drill, no need to belabor the point there.” She put her gloved hands on overalled hips and held her pointed chin high. Ah hell, its been too long and it looks like I’ve gotten rusty. “Sorry miss, I’ll leave you be-“
Yes, I Write Professionally
Posted: December 8, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, Story, Uncategorized | Tags: Academic, Architect of Experience, Art, Blog, Confession, Critic, Essay, Excerpt, Humanity, Humor, Humour, Motivational, Narrative, Story, Thinking, Writing Leave a commentEvery day I don’t spend Writing or developing a project feels like a waste.
Its been this way for a few years. Time that I have spent, for instance, writing out over 350 pages filling 3 notebooks, writing the better part of 2 plays a pilot and half of a novel. I used to write every single day, Now I’m lucky if I have time to sit and work on my days off.
Its been a theme of my last few months. A constant droning voice gnawing away at what I assume is my mind, telling me in some eldritch tongue that I need to write more to service the elder-gods, or some other nonsense.
Even so, I don’t like to refer to myself as a “Writer”.
The term has too much baggage. Whenever I say, “I Write”, there is an immediate look on someones face. There are always questions.
“Have you written anything I know?”
That would be code for, “Are you published?”. The answer is: Not Yet.
“What do you write?”
A question thats kind of like asking someone what neighborhood they live in when you don’t know the city. I appreciate the interest and will give you the logline, but most of the time its met with the blank look that reminds me how much of a rhetorical question “What I write” usually is.
Words. I write Words.
“But what do you do for a living?”
Starve, mostly. Or, more realistically, I have a job and write when I can.
“Oh that’s lovely”
You can often hear the condescension drip like… Well… Condensation. I hope the inadequacy of that simile illustrates how few fucks I give.
But always it comes down to one essential question that people seem to have: “Do you make a living writing?”
No. I don’t.
Not many people do.
But that doesn’t mean that I don’t write professionally.
I don’t know if I have enough experience or gravitas to speak eloquently on this matter. After all, it was only 3 years ago that I even began pursuing writing as a career. But it seems if I haven’t gotten paid for writing, there is an expectation that I should say that I am an “Aspiring Writer”.
But I’m not aspiring to anything, I’m working. Its my second and my third job. I am sure that a lot of other “Aspiring Writers” feel exactly the same way.
Why would we do such a disservice to the work we are doing by referring to our writing as anything other than professional?
Architect of Experience 
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