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.
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 6
Posted: October 18, 2014 Filed under: Fiction, Story | Tags: Architect of Experience, Critic, Critique, Essay, Excerpt, Humor, Humour, Narrative, Story, Thinking, What God, Writing Leave a commentAfter a brief employment-inspired pause, Here is Chapter 6! Here is Chapter 5 for those who want it
What I had to do before anything else was to figure out Kraden’s timeline for the night, something to do before the blood-work was in. After that I had to find out who the “She” was and what she had to do with Kraden’s old job as the CEO of Æthenmus.
Walking into Adam Kraden’s campaign headquarters made me wonder if they even knew he was dead. I expected to see at least an intern composing themselves, mopping tears with a tie or tissue. Paid or unpaid, it looked like everyone still had a job to do.
So I walked up to the nearest secretary, “I’m Detective Grant, here to investigate the murder of Adam Kraden”
He didn’t bat an eye, just stared at me for a second and, “Take a seat we’ll be right with you.”
Nothing makes a man feel more unimportant than the bureaucratic power of the waiting room.
I sat and waited for 10 minutes while catching snippets of the office buzz. It sounded mostly like volunteers assuring constituents; saying that his campaign was being taken over by his campaign manager, yes she is a good person, yes she has the same platform, sadly campaign donations are not refundable, the money has already been used.
Then I heard her. “Sir, you are welcome to withdraw your continued funding… yes I understand… But if you don’t feel I can do as good a job as…” She faltered, seemingly unable to say his name, “Yes, sorry… Yes I’ll be fine. Thank you sir. I’ll be fine.” She was a tall woman coming through the cubicles. When she ended the phone call her eyes hardened and her voice was immediately steady as she talked to the aides around her. “Gretchen Thomas, Detective Grant. Its good to meet you.” She didn’t seem to care that I knew the phone call was a performance.
“I hear you’re running for the seat?” She paused for a second, maybe betraying her humanity, maybe evaluating what I knew. I didn’t trust her.
“There is a lot of money in this campaign. It goes to waste or I run for the seat” The aides around her studied their phones. “My office?”
I followed. She led me to a small room off the side of the large office. Probably Kraden’s. “Haven’t moved yet?”
“I’m going to turn it into a lounge. Something for the volunteers” She sat down and straightened her desk, not looking at me. Everyone is guilty of something and I wasn’t here to be her friend.
“I need to know what Kraden was doing last night.”
“I have his schedule right here-“
“No, I need to know what he was doing last night”
A look of understanding dawned on her, “I don’t understand.”
“His schedule tells me what his schedule was last night, I want to know what he was doing.” Her face was tight. “I’m not press, this is a closed investigation. You can tell me right here or I can drive you to the precinct and do it there.” It was an old trick. But the old tricks worked.
After chewing the inside of her lip for a few seconds, “He had an interview at 7 for a late-night show. After that he came back and was signing letters until he left.” She was lying. She knew I knew she was lying. I’ll still have to do this the hard way.
“Has he been acting weird the last few days? Anything out of place? any calls or mail?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Where do you keep your death threats?”
This made her sputter, “They weren’t serious, there were only a few- we never bothered to report them. How did you know?”
“A leap of faith.” A progressive reform campaign mounted by an ex-CEO? Of course there were death threats. “I’d like to see them.”
She walked into Kraden’s office. It was neat and well organized. On her way in Gretchen passed the desk and straightened out one of the pencil holders offhandedly, like it was second nature. “He kept them in his desk. He liked to flip through them to remind him that he was doing the right thing”
It would have been funny. “Was he ever threatened in person?”
“No.” She was holding onto the death threats. I held out my hand and she reluctantly passed them to me. “There were always protestors, but-“
“What time did he leave last night?”
Her face fell a bit. Not an act like the phone call, but something like guilt or empathy. “I don’t remember”
“Call me if you do. We’ll be in touch Ms. Thomas.”
She showed me out of Kraden’s office and went back to hers. I walked out to the main floor of the office and everyone there was working furiously. They had been listening. I smiled and turned to the room.
“Hello everyone!” I wasn’t shouting, but I didn’t need to. They all stopped, “Hello! My name is Michael Grant, I’m a detective. We need to construct a timeline for Mr. Kraden’s last few days.” I reached into my coat and pulled out a silver case, I pulled a small stack of business cards out of them, “If any of you have seen anything out of place or weird or even worth knowing, please contact us.” I held the cards up high and walked over to the large chrome coffee maker. I made myself up a cup and put the business cards on top.
As I left a few people in the office decided it was time that their mugs needed refilling. This might have been worth the drive.
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!
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