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Virtual Minefields

This amusing story of how Minesweeper was updated for Vista floated across my desk the other day. The post is a year old now, but worth a read. With all the effort we expend trying to expand our audience beyond the rather easy-to-please domain of teenage boys and young men, I wonder how much we consider what would happen if our games we played by hundreds of millions instead of millions.

Minesweeper has that level of reach, and unfortunately for MS, among their hundreds of millions of players, are many who have to deal with landmines in their everyday lives. Sure seems to make things complicated and messy.

Braid goes Live

It's already floating around a couple other places, but I wanted to make sure to post it here too, since I was late to the party the last time people got to talking about Braid.

The MTV interview really impressed me, and I've had dinner a couple of times with Jon in the last year or so as he's been getting closer and closer to this.

I'm really looking forward to playing it, finally. Congratulations Jon.

Narrative and Flow

Although I have not seen the presentation myself, nor had the chance to look at the slides and notes, Pat is back from Austin and he's posted the materials from his talk. By all accounts it went well, hopefully we'll find an hour when we're not putting out fires (or starting them) so he can present it internally.

I'm not in Austin

But Pat is.

Pat is the Narrative Designer on my project, and has been busting his ass for the last 2+ years to do all the nuts and bolts work of making this crazy dynamic interactive narrative we dreamed up for Far Cry 2 actually work.

He'll be sharing some (but nowhere near all) of his insights Wednesday afternoon, so for those in the Austin area who are interested in how to look at narrative as a dynamic system rather than a static construct, check it out.

You're going to have to learn this stuff eventually.