Tag Archives: transmedia

Sex and sexuality: The Jane Austen game breaking the MMO rules | engadget #Austen #MMOG #gaming #RPG #transmedia

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Ever, Jane is an online role-playing game set in the dramatic, romantic worlds of Jane Austen. It invites players to attend sophisticated dinner parties and fancy balls, share gossip, keep secrets, fall in love, get married and climb the ribbon-lined social ladder of Regency-era England. It is definitely not a sex game, though sometimes players get wrapped up in this universe of exquisite gowns and forbidden desire, and they simply can’t help themselves.

“Let’s just say that we had to put in private chat,” Ever, Jane creator Judy Tyrer says with a laugh. READ MORE: Sex and sexuality: The Jane Austen game breaking the MMO rules | engadget

 

Post Disclosure: I supported the Ever, Jane Kickstarter campaign by giving a small donation. Downloaded the beta version but unable to run software properly yet on my 2010 MacBook Pro Intel OS X Yosemite. Note to self: Buy new computer so I can play Ever, Jane.

Welcome to Night Vale #novel is as weird, existential, and addictive as #podcast that inspired it | Vox #storytelling #transmedia #fiction #worldbuilding

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Taking the form of a local radio show, Welcome to Night Vale is a 30-minute, twice-monthly dispatch full of nightmarish community news conveyed in a tranquil manner. Imagine a municipality that features a sinister, five-headed dragon and occasional rifts in space-time, but whose citizens are often more concerned about, say, the dry scones at the last PTA meeting, and you’ll understand why Night Vale has been described as something akin to “if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman started a game of SIMS and then just left it running forever.”

Since its launch in 2012, Welcome to Night Vale has expanded into a sprawling, frightening universe with a lot of charm. In its three-year existence, the podcast has produced 79 episodes (and counting). It’s also spawned a successful live show and, as of October, a novel that debuted at No. 4 on the New York Times best-seller list. Along the way, its creators have demonstrated their ability to comfortably shift mediums while building one of the most immense and compelling fictional “worlds” in recent memory. READ MORE: The Welcome to Night Vale novel is as weird, existential, and addictive as the podcast that inspired it | Vox

The Pickle Index Is a Delightfully Weird, App-Driven Novel Like No Other | WIRED #apps #books #digital  #storytelling #transmedia #multimedia #interactive

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THE PICKLE INDEX  tells the tale of an incompetent circus troupe that sets out to rescue its ringmaster, Zloty Kornblatt, from a dystopian, brine-obsessed government. If that doesn’t pique your interest, maybe this will: The Pickle Index is a paperback. But it’s also a beautifully illustrated, hardcover set of two volumes that tell the story in tandem. Oh, and it’s also an app. Not an e-book, mind you—an app, where a user’s “Citizenship Quotient” points are allocated based on how often you upload actual pickle recipes. Confused? Good. That’s kind of the point.

The fact is, The Pickle Index is not a traditional novel, nor is it a conventional app. When Eli Horowitz and Russell Quinn set out to create the multimedia storytelling experience, they made a conscious decision to eschew hallmarks of design like accessibility and ease of use. Instead, they provide multiple entry-points into an intricate and immersive world. In doing so, they’ve reimagined what a digital literary experience can be.

Source: The Pickle Index Is a Delightfully Weird, App-Driven Novel Like No Other | WIRED

Immersive #Theater Experience Lets You Become One of ‘The Goonies’ | Mashable #transmedia #movies #film #interactive #fans #entertainment

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Though we might not be getting a sequel to The Goonies anytime soon, director Richard Donner has revealed plans for the next best thing: an “immersive” theater experience in which you can be play of the Goonies. In a recent interview with Yahoo! Movies, Donner divulged that the classic 1985 film is about to become a uniquely immersive stage experience on the off-Broadway stage. Immersion theater is “where there’s no seats, the venue is you go into a warehouse and there’s something happening in that warehouse and that’s the play you’ve come to see, only you become part of it and you travel through with actors,” Donner said. READ MORE: Immersive theater experience lets you become one of ‘The Goonies’ | Mashable

Digital #Storytelling: An Opportunity for #Libraries to Lead in the Digital Age | Dr. Brian Detlor | Slideshare #tech #society

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‘Her Story’ is a Compelling New Type of #Interactive #Storytelling | Ars Technica #video #gaming #transmedia

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To anyone who was paying attention to video games in the mid-’90s, the term “FMV game” probably still inspires snorts of derision. The handful of titles that shoehorned simple gameplay on top of highly compressed full-motion video (FMV) usually suffered from low-quality sound and images, poor production values, limited interaction options, and ponderous repetition of a few short video clips through multiple plays. The results ranged from mediocre at the high end to some of the worst games ever made at the low end. By the end of the ’90s, filmed, live-action video clips gave way to polygons and animated, pre-rendered sprites as the gameplay and story-telling engine of choice.

But just as failed ’90s experiments in virtual reality are leading to a resurgence in the form today, the FMV gaming failures of decades past are finally being explored with the technology and game-design advancements of today. Her Story is proof that FMV games don’t have to be awful and that filming actors on a set could be a criminally underexplored form for interactive storytelling. READ MORE: Her Story is a compelling new type of interactive storytelling | Ars Technica.

Must Read: New ‘Walk-In Comic Book’ Uses Augmented Reality to Show Sexual Assault Survivors as Heroes | Mashable #genderequality #comics #augmentedreality

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Watch the video!!

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When a young woman in New Delhi, India, was brutally gang-raped on a bus in December 2012, making international headlines, Ram Devineni wasn’t going to stay silent. The filmmaker and artist marched in the streets alongside other protesters, calling for swift justice and systemic change to the all-too-common violence against women that plagues the country.

When he asked a Delhi police officer what he thought about the young woman’s assault, the officer told him, “No good girl walks home alone at night,” implying that she either provoked the rape or, worse, deserved it. His words reflected the misguided, patriarchal view that permeates much of Indian society, silencing women even further with social stigma.

“I realized at that moment that this was not a legal issue, but a cultural problem,” Devineni tells Mashable. “As a filmmaker and as an artist, I wanted to really address this in a cultural context.”

That’s why, two years later, he created and directed the transmedia comic book Priya’s Shakti — a story about the titular Priya, a gang-rape survivor-turned-superhero who partners with a Hindu goddess to fight sexual violence and challenge the patriarchy.

Co-written by Vikas K. Menon with artwork by Dan Goldman, the comic book is the first of its kind to use augmented reality and image recognition, using various media to tell the story of fighting back against sexual assault.

READ MORE: New ‘walk-in comic book’ uses augmented reality to show sexual assault survivors as heroes | Mashable