aaronareed.net

I’ve delivered invited talks, commencement speeches, and keynotes at a wide range of games and procedural text events. Here are some highlights with links to videos where they exist. See some testimonials about my public speaking! For a fuller list of talks, check out my curriculum vitae.

Keynotes and Invited Talks

“5 Lessons From 50 Years of Text Games.” Opening Keynote. NarraScope 2022.

“Twisty Little Novels, All Different: Reading(s) From Subcutanean.” Opening plenary. Electronic Literature Organization conference, Orlando, 2020.

“Questioning Everything: A Wide-Ranging Design Practice For Interactive Storytelling.” Keynote. International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, Snowbird, 2019.

Conference Talks (Highlights)

“From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon: 50 Years of Text Games!” BangBangCon 2021.

“Cadences, Lacunae, and Subcutaneans: Ten Years of Procedural Novels.” Roguelike Celebration 2020.

“Machines for Getting Lost on Purpose: Kentucky Route Zero and the Future(s) of Adventure Games.” Talk. NarraScope, 2020.

“Building Author-First Platforms for Conversational AI.” Talk. Virtual Beings Summit, 2019, San Francisco.

“What Digital Storygames Can Learn From Analog Storygames.” Talk. NarraScope, Boston. 2019.

“Building an Open-Ended Conversation System for Expressive Game Characters.” Talk; with Alan Hinchcliffe. Game Developer’s Conference 2018, AI Summit, San Francisco.

“The Craft of Interactive Fiction.’‘ Panelist. WorldCon 76, San Jose.

“Conversational Characters with Spirit AI.” Talk. Google Interactive: Creative Applications of AI. Google campus, Mountain View. 2017.

“Ice-Bound: Narrative Innovation Showcase.” Game Developer Conference 2016, Narrative Summit, San Francisco.

“Intellectual Engagement and Games as a Cultural Medium.” Panelist. PAX 2017, Seattle.

Full talk history can be found in my CV.

Books, Book Chapters, and Journal Articles

50 Years of Text Games. Forthcoming.

Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider. With Anastasia Salter and John Murray. Bloomsbury, 2020.

“Amnesia as Text and Game.” In Total Amnesia: The Complete Text and Programming Notes of the World’s Most Famous Lost Computer Game, ed. Sarah Smith. Max Light Books, 2021.

“Telling Stories with Maps and Rules: Using the Interactive Fiction Language ‘Inform 7’ in a Creative Writing Workshop.” In Creative Writing in the Digital Age, ed. Mike Clark, Trent Hergenrader, and Joe Rein. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

“Re-Visualizing Afghanistan in ‘what if im the bad guy’: Using Palimpsest to Create an AR Documentary.” In not here not there, Leonardo Electronic Almanac Vol 19 Issue 1 (special issue on Augmented Reality), 2013.

Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7. Course Technology Press, 2010.

(See all book projects, including fiction.)

Capstone Works

“Changeful Tales: Design-Driven Approaches Toward More Expressive Storygames.” PhD Dissertation, University of California Santa Cruz, 2017.

“A Sequence of Possibilities: Constructive fictions, quantum authoring, and the search for an ideal story system.” MFA Thesis, University of California Santa Cruz, 2011.

Academic Papers (selected)

“The Ensemble Engine: Next-Generation Social Physics.” Benjamin Samuel, Aaron Reed, Paul Maddaloni, Michael Mateas and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. Foundations of Digital Games, 2015.

“The Eurekon: A Design Pattern in Expressive Storygames.” With Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas. Seventh Intelligent Narrative Technologies Workshop, Milwaukee, 2014.

“Ice-Bound: Combining Richly-Realized Story with Expressive Gameplay.” With Jacob Garbe, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas. Foundations of Digital Games, 2014.

“Author Assistance Visualizations for Ice-Bound: A Combinatorial Narrative.” Jacob Garbe, Aaron Reed, Melanie Dickinson, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Michael Mateas. Foundations of Digital Games, 2014.

Prom Week: Designing past the game/story dilemma. Joshua McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel, Aaron A Reed, Michael Mateas, Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In Foundations of Digital Games 2013.

“Sharing Authoring with Algorithms: Procedural Generation of Satellite Sentences in Text-based Interactive Stories.”. In FDG 2012: Third Workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, Raleigh, North Carolina, 2012.

“Creating ‘maybe make some change'” (Extended Abstract). In Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, 2011.

“A Step Towards the Future of Role-Playing Games: The SpyFeet Mobile RPG Project.” With Ben Samuel, Anne Sullivan, Ricky Grant, April Grow, John Lazaro, Jennifer Mahal, Sri Kurniawan, Marilyn Walker, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In Proceedings of the 7th Annual International Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference, Stanford, 2011.

“Blue Lacuna: Lessons Learned Writing the World’s Longest Interactive Fiction.” In Electronic Literature Organization Archive & Innovate, Brown University, 2010.

“Knock’s Memories: Creating an Emotional Story Space with Inform 7.” In Critical Code Studies at USC, 2010.

“Social Story Worlds with Comme il Faut.” Joshua McCoy, Mike Treanor, Ben Samuel, Aaron A. Reed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas. Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games Special Issue on Computational Narrative and Games, 2014.

“Playing with Words: From intuition to evaluation of game dialogue interfaces.” Serdar Sali, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Steven Dow, Michael Mateas, Sri Kurniawan, Aaron A. Reed, Ronald Liu. Foundations of Digital Games. Monterey, 2010.

Blogs and Other Writing

On Subcutanean: Index to blog posts on this procedural book project.

On Ice-Bound: Details of the system were written up in a four-part blog post on the Ice-Bound blog. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four.

On 18 Cadence: “There was a house at 18 Cadence Street…” and “Some Favorite Cadences” (author’s personal blog), and “18 Cadence and Processes of Expression”, Expressive Intelligence Studio blog.

“Sharing Authorship with Algorithms: The Challenges of Writing Interactive Stories.” Ooligan Press, May 4, 2012.

“Prom Week Authoring: Crafting Procedurally-Driven Narratives.” Expressive Intelligence Studio blog, February 9, 2012.

On maybe make some change: ” ‘Games’ for Grief, Mourning, and Anger.” Expressive Intelligence Studio blog, October 7, 2011.

“Teaching IF at UCSC.” Author’s personal blog, September 21, 2011.