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?
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?
What God, Chapter 5
Posted: September 25, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, General, Story | Tags: Architect of Experience, Art, Blog, Critic, Critique, Essay, Excerpt, Experience, Humanity, Language, Narrative, Story, Theatre, Thinking, What God, Worth, Writing Leave a commentAnother Chapter! Chapter 4 Here
I knew that crime scene. I’d seen it before, spread over a loading dock in an alley in midtown. A scene I left chasing a man who was running from the scene. He was covered in blood. A man who I fired at and accidentally hit a lady further down the alley. She later apologized for getting in my way. The bullet is still in her collarbone, and she baked me a cake to say sorry.
The worst part was that the body disappeared when I got back to the loading dock.
So I took a squad car back to the precinct and I stopped on the highway to grab a bottle of water out of the trunk. I was getting lightheaded. I’d have to twist some balls to get the blood-work off of the scene by tonight. Its not that I didn’t appreciate what the techs did, I just wanted to have some real evidence to follow before I started chasing ghosts. Ghosts seemed to like long car rides anyways.
“I don’t want you to start looking into this” Misha was right, of course. My only stake in this investigation was supposed to be the murder of Adam Kraden.
“But there is too strong a chance that it could be linked.” She knew I wasn’t wrong.
“Michael, you have a pad of paper that doesn’t say anything and-“
“It says-“
“It doesn’t mean anything!” It didn’t mean much, but it meant something.
“Look at this thing, Misha.” The evidence bag and the pad was between us on her desk. “Kraden was holding this before he died.” I flipped it over, showing her the bloody fingerprints on the back.
“Then tell me what to do about it.”
“Nothing. Not yet.” Misha wasn’t happy. A dead politician and a commissioner who didn’t approve in her choice of detective was enough to make anyone jumpy. For Misha? She was pissed. I didn’t like waiting to drop the worse news on her, but I’d rather she kick me out than spend another hour yelling at me.
“Why,” She pinched the bridge of her nose and measured her words carefully, “The Hell. Are. You. Here.”
“I wanted to let you know that this might be more complicated than the murder,” I heard her mumble a small ‘fantastic’ before I continued, “And also that I am adding the midtown files to this case. The body I witnessed is concurrent with the way Kraden was killed.” I was scared for a second that she was going to lunge over the desk and kill me with a paperweight. She didn’t. I would later wish she did.
“This is my career on the line too. If you fuck up, I fucked up”
“Do you trust me?”
“No, but I believe you.” This wasn’t the response I expected.
Being witness to something like Midtown and then having no evidence to back it up and having no one believe you- It’s an awful thing. You start to become obsessed with proving it. The midtown file was nothing more than my report and some nearby security camera footage.
What I wanted to do was to dig back into it, to link it somehow to Kraden or to find any lead at all. I wanted to make it real. And the worst part about this was that just in the early dark hours of this morning I was driving around trying to make myself finally let go of it. I wanted so bad to let it go. But then I see the parts of Kraden laid around his living room. Now I can’t.
I was back at my desk sipping a cup of coffee for twenty minutes before I even realized I had gotten the file. It was open on my desk. I forced myself to close it.
Devil’s House: For You To Listen To.
Posted: September 22, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, Language, Performance, Sound | Tags: Architect of Experience, Art, Blog, Devil's House, Essay, Excerpt, Experience, House, Humanity, Language, Monologue, Music, Narrative, Performance, Script, Story, Talent, Theatre, Worth, Writing Leave a commentWell I guess I’ve strayed into multimedia.
My friend and housemate Scott Key helped me out by throwing a little voice acting onto Devil’s House. I’m pretty damn pleased with the product, and this may be the mode of distribution from here on out.
The first two chapters are currently being hosted on SoundCloud. I encourage you to give a listen. They aren’t yet available for download- but they will be at a later date.
Please listen! Enjoy!
What God, Chapter 4
Posted: September 19, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, General, Story | Tags: Architect of Experience, Art, Blog, Critic, Critique, Essay, Experience, Narrative, Story, Thinking, What God, Writing Leave a commentThe next installment of What God. [Chapter 3 found here]
Some things don’t bear explanation. Every cop there was wondering who could have managed to tear Kraden apart like that. I was wondering how his wife and daughter could have stood to listen to him scream. 50 people in this house combing it for evidence and only 1 paramedic taking care of the two women outside wrapped in heat blankets
I walked out of the garage, past a few buckets full of sick and a few more expensive cars. Ms. Kraden sat in the back of the ambulance with her daughter. The wife sat with a face of stone, her daughter was beside her shivering and breathing oxygen from a tank.
“Ms. Kraden, I’m detective Grant-“
She even sounded stone, “Someone already took my statement, detective.” I was glad that at least somebody had taken some time away from the bloodbath in the living room carpet. Messes like that tended to occupy the attention of men in my position. I had no wish to spend more time in there than I had to.
“I know. I’m going to ask you to go through it again.” It was the worst part of the job; asking someone to relive what they had gone through. But repeated tellings of the incident can often reveal more than good forensics. Every time you make someone retell a story they process what they saw and and heard, leaving out the unimportant bits and dwelling on the more important ones.
“He came in late. He often did. Because of work.” Ms. Kraden didn’t believe herself but I let her continue, “He came in. He cursed a bit, I thought he stubbed his toe. I was upstairs sleeping. He then started talking, like he was on the phone. Then he started yelling, something like ‘I didn’t have anything to do with that, I left the company, how should I know’ then the screaming started.” I was marking all of this down when she stopped. I let her breath, studying my notes.
“They said it must have been more than one” It was the daughter.
I looked to Ms. Kraden for permission, but she was staring off into space. “What do you mean?”
“When they were talking there was only two sets of footsteps. My dads and the other persons.” She went back to the oxygen. I couldn’t imagine what she was feeling.
“Did you hear him speak? Did he do anything else? the other man?” But I still had to ask. This was about more than Kraden.
“I only heard the footsteps. It could have been anyone.” She looked terrified, holding onto the oxygen mask like it was the only thing keeping her here.
I let them be, thanking them both. I told them I would keep in touch. It was a lie, but lies are comforting.
We have two scenarios. Either Kraden saw someone he knew well enough to know exactly why they were there, or the attacker delivered their message without speaking.
I went back to the living room and started looking around. A number of techs started trying to call for my attention but I waved them off. “Was there any paper recovered?” I asked the room. None of them answered. “It can be blank, a scrap, almost anything. Hell, I’ll take a whiteboard.” That seemed to help them along. A small tech walked up and passed me a blood-covered pad in an evidence bag. I gloved up, pulled it from the bag and grabbed a nearby pencil. The old tricks still worked. I shaded the top of the pad, the only part that wasn’t soaked in blood. In that I saw a relief of the last thing that had been written there. “Where is She” in bold, blocky print.
I got someone with a camera to document and had the pad sealed back up. I then went outside and threw up.
Devil’s House, Excerpt 2
Posted: September 15, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, Story, Uncategorized | Tags: Architect of Experience, Blog, Devil's, Devil's House, Essay, Excerpt, Hell, House, Humanity, Narrative, Satan, Scratch, Story, Writing Leave a commentThis is the second excerpt from “Devil’s House”, a Novella that will take you to hell and back. Excerpt One Found Here
Hell Is Other Waiting Rooms
I woke up in a warm room to the soft oompah of New Orlean’s Swing. I opened my eyes to look up at a managerial spackle cieling. I was in a waiting room on a rough nap carpet. I groaned and got to my feet. There were no doors. The walls had recreations of dutch skyscapes and impressionist lilies. There were a few low tables scattered around with pamphlets laid out on them.
I walked over and picked one up, “So You’re In Hell… What Now?”
I wasn’t really that surprised. I knew this day would come. I knew what I signed up for and I was ready for it so I settled down in a chair and started to find out what the rest of my damnation would look like. So I cracked open the paper when I heard a voice
“That doesn’t apply to you, actually” I hadn’t noticed when She arrived or what door through which she’d suddenly appeared- I waited for her to continue. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but-”
“I’m Dead?” It seemed like the likely explanation.
“Well… no” And apparently it wasn’t
“But I’m in Hell”
“Yes”
“But I’m not dead”
“Yes”
And now for the more difficult question: “So why am I in Hell?”
“Well” She started, “You’re an idiot.” You can say one thing about Hell: Its brutally honest.
“Was it because I stole from Satan?” I mean, it did seem like a good idea at the time.
She nodded, looking at me like I tried to push a door that said pull.
Something nagged at me, “So I’m not dead, but I am in Hell?”
“Yes”
“Why?” Because, you know, it seemed like a simple enough question
She sighed and turned her hand at an invisible door knob, opening a Matisse that stretched into a door. I felt a little like a drunk kitten in a gothic wonderland, innocent enough to just accept the impossible but not coherent enough to create a simile. I gathered myself, nabbed a pamphlet, and jogged to catch up.
“So,” Caught in the forbidding vortex of awkward silence, “Whats your name?”
“Lily” She didn’t even look over at me, and kept walking. The hallway was lined with doors whose glass windows were the transparent backs of canvasses. Each room was labeled 666. I chuckled, earning a straightforward glare from Lily. This was a long hallway.
“So whats in all these rooms? More people like me?”
“No”
“Dead people?”
“Yes” She had such eloquence
At long last an old elevator door came to view at the hallway’s end. She pressed the button and we waited. Again in silence. So I Asked: “You aren’t going to ask me my name?”
“No I am not”
“Do you already know it?”
“Nope” This was going wonderfully.
“You don’t even care.”
“Yes.”
So I stood there and wondered why it was taking so long for the elevator to arrive. “Well… I’m Scratch.” I didn’t bother sticking out my hand
She grunted, a second later the elevator dinged and we stepped inside to badly played bluegrass. We both grimmaced.
“Why is the music-”
“Its Hell,” She snapped.
So after 15 minutes of, well, Hell, the elevator dinged again and she pulled aside the accordian doors and stepped through. I followed. The lobby beyond was massive and more hell-like than my quaintly beuarucratic waiting room. The marble and granite was a deep maroon with jet lines running through it. Decorative stalactites hung from the domed ceiling. All around us bussled the diverse and disheveled dead, led around by men and women in crisp suits. The Charons of Grand Central Styx.
At the far end of the lobby, flanked by large staircases leading down, is a foreboding set of double doors with a sign that read simple, “1”. Signs on the stairs said, in a too too cheery manner, “Levels 2-?”.
“Keep up!” I hadn’t realized I had stopped and had nearly forgotten Lily was standing there, I jogged again to keep up.
“Where” I paused for a moment before continuing. Some questions in the world you really don’t need the answers to, but even still you want them.
“Choose whichever level you want”
“Really?”
“Look, you were in a room, I brought you down here, you don’t have an assignment so you go where you want, I don’t care.” She scowled a little and turned heel and walked away.
I called after her, “What do I do?”
“That’s not my problem”
With that she was lost in the crowd. Then I did what any flesh-and-blood man with a pulse in Hell would do. I strode out into the first layer of hell and hoped to God I could find a bar.
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