aaronareed.net

18 Cadence

aaron — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 21:20:50 +0000

18 Cadence is an iPad storymaking platform that lets its readers explore the history of a house through the hundred years of the twentieth century. Moving through space and time, a reader encounters hundreds of events, characters, and objects. Each piece is not static text but a movable, dynamic fragment that can be repositioned, merged, expanded, or reconsidered. Like magnetic fridge poetry for narrative, 18 Cadence lets its readers manipulate the pieces of a story with their fingers, and invites them to assemble their own history from the raw material of a century of living.

18 Cadence will be released soon for iPad and browsers.

Almost Goodbye

aaron — Wed, 02 May 2012 09:55:58 +0000

Almost Goodbye is an experiment in minimalist procedural content generation for interactive narratives. It does not try to generate a whole story or plot points from scratch, but instead asks what is the minimum amount of procedural generation that can be added to a hand-authored story to produce something both computationally interesting but still narratively sound. The resulting narrative, about a scientist leaving Earth forever and saying her final goodbyes, generates “satellite” sentences that color the narrator’s description and perception of her conversations based on the choices made by the player in prior conversations and other player-influenced contextual cues.

Goodbye was a selection for “Avenues of Access,” an exhibit of new electronic literature at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference.

Prom Week

aaron — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 09:41:57 +0000

“Prom Week” is an innovative new social simulation game from the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz. Unlike other social games like The Sims, Prom Week’s goal (as with its spiritual and technological predecessor, Façade) is to merge rich character specificity with a highly dynamic story space: a playable system with a coherent narrative. Driven by over 5,000 social considerations and 900 “story instantiations,” Prom Week allows for emergent behavior in a highly authored narrative space.

Aaron served as Lead Writer on Prom Week, supervising a writing team that produced six thousand lines of dialogue and nearly two thousand character state changes. Prom Week was a 2012 IGF (Independent Games Festival) nominee for Technical Excellence.

maybe make some change

aaron — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 09:42:55 +0000

“maybe make some change” merges parser-based interactive fiction with textual and multimedia layering to produce a confrontational exploration of a true event. Inspired by the trial of Adam Winfield, a whistleblower soldier accused of murder, the piece freezes a single battlefield moment and replays it from half a dozen violently conflicting perspectives.

“change” questions the trust we place in narrators, and explores the fine edge between moral and immoral acts in a war zone. Juxtaposing its text narration with both footage of first-person shooters set during contemporary wars and online social networking pages of the accused soldiers, the piece also challenges the representation of and engagement with current events in mainstream interactive media.

“change” was part of the jury-award-winning “‘what if im the bad guy’ and other stories” exhibition at the 2011 UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts & New Media MFA show. It has been exhibited at the PAX East game convention in Boston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, and will be seen in the 2012 UCLA Game Art Festival. It has been featured on gaming blogs GameSetWatch, Rock Paper Shotgun, and reviewed in the Denver Westword paper.

Perfect

aaron — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:44:32 +0000

Perfect is an experiment in sculptural fiction. As the user moves two blocks around a screen, the contents of a five-sentence story change: minutely with small movements, and more broadly with large ones. The hope is to create an exploratory space where the user can find an arrangement which produces a pleasing story.