Cerebral Arcade

A pretty girl. Teacher’s pet. But she’s mean. She took your toy. You want to hurt her. Get her back. Burn her. She’s mean But teacher loves her. She’s smiling. Giggling. Playing with your...

Partly due to travel over the past month and partly for personal reasons, I’ve avoided writing about Gamergate before now. Well, that’s not quite...

Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl was recommended to me by a mentor who has now recommended several books in a row about young writers coming into their own...

In part 1 of this post, I gave a recap of the CAsplit narrative. In this post, I’m going to talk a little more...

A couple of weeks ago for our collaborative narrative week, the class designed a netprov, a collaborative Twitter narrative to be played over a weekend. Netprovs are an interesting blend of improv theater and networked communication—in our case, Twitter. The design challenges are similar to those of designing LARPs, though the tradition of improv theater provides many clues for how to accomplish this task. Still, many interesting question arise: how closely do we want people to stick to a planned narrative? How much freedom should they have? How do we keep them within the bounds of the game without it feeling stifling? And since this is occurring on social media, if the scenario is based on real events, do we signal that this is fiction, and if so how (without breaking the magic circle)?

A few days ago, I was at my local used game store and there, in the Most Wanted Games cabinet, I saw it: the...

Ideology is the underlying set of principles and beliefs of a given group of people. Ideology is the things we presume to be true...

First exposure: “I’m standing at the entrance, by the Titanfall booth,” I text to a friend, who is coming to meet me at the entrance...