I think it feels at once calm and hectic, removed and immersed. The entire situation is set up as this duality - so, for example, the tasteful interior of the apartment offers a haven for the threatening hostility of the city, but no protection. You visit the apartment every week, while the owner is out. You get a short list of housekeeping tasks to do. But there are also other activities that are not on the list. And you're entirely free to choose what you do. There's no victory or failure conditions in Sunset, but everything you do nudges the narrative a little bit.
End objective needs to be clear Sub-goals need to be obvious Live and Learn Backwards Puzzles I forgot to pick it up Puzzles should advance the story Real time is bad drama Incremental reward Arbitrary Puzzles Reward Intent Unconnected Events Give the Player Options
A modernized film noire detective story. Project Black and White follows the story of Terry Hensen, a private detective who is hired to help a man find his lost wife and kid. Terry soon finds himself surrounded by lies and deceit as an underworld of drugs and crime washes over him. We've worked hard to include tropes and nods to classic noire films, such as character archetypes "The hard-boiled detective", "the Mentor", "the Femme Fatale", and devices like the internal monologue, brooding jazz music etc.
an interactive web series which follows two characters that believe the internet is becoming a conscious entity. The Glass acts as a messenger for the entity’s thoughts. The writer, Eben Portnoy, allowed for typical scripting, but also live Tweet mining during the filming. Here’s how it was accomplished. For this fictional story about characters embodying “the global brain,” student programmers Chung and Karan Chugh had to create a “machine-learning” algorithm that would automatically select real tweets that would become dialogue for the actors.
As visitors move through the gallery the story progresses and Mr. Kalia begins transforming. The experience is more Dalí than Disney. Mr. Kalia’s body is covered by locks, his hands turn into gushing fountains, and birds begin flocking to branches that sprout from various parts of his body. Mr. Kalia’s transformation was brought to life using an impressive toolchain that included the Kinect, C++, Coffeescript, CSS, Google Compute Engine, Nite, Node.js, OpenFrameworks, Openni, Paper.js, Socket.io, and Tween.js, all to be rendered in a Google Chrome browser window.
“It is important for people to understand that the stories they hold close, the stories of their lives, are actually very important. These stories remind us who we are, where we come from, and provide valuable lessons, clues, and roadmaps for how we move forward. So much of the city has left in the last 50 years and our stories and history have left with them.
In his talk, Simon covers a concept about Starting with Why? - and he mentions "Crossing the Chasm", which is something that comes up often in the Drupal community. We say we can cross the chasm with training, or documentation, and I think those are good things to dial up. Ultimately, the members of the Drupal community have the "why" down, it's just a matter of showing the rest of the world.
Back at BarCampOrlando this year, I gave a (mostly finished) version of this presentation, about the fall of the local bookstore, and a strategy for saving such establishments. As BarCamp is filled with programmers, I then tried to give them a relevant example: how to make your app better. (read: website, product, video, etc.) My argument is to focus on storytelling, and think like a Boutique. Credit goes to Tara Hunt for the idea of boutique stores.
I promised some folks from BarCamp I would link to my blog post where I talked about saving local bookstores. I will post some slides soon, but I want to include the bullet points (i.e. actually finish the slides) before they get posted to SlideShare.
Also, if anyone out there is looking for the mailing list for New Media Orlando, jump on there and join the discussion.