Narrative design for Weston Game Lab.
A novel form of student induction for the University of Chicago: a nonlinear text adventure in a University-Archipelago of Haven.
My work focused on narrative design and implementation.
I wrote two of the four main gameplay areas. A lot of time and love went into developing a unique voice for either.
The Humanities island was built with a strong sense
of space and connectivity, to feel lived-in and
reflective of its disciplines.
The Arts and Crafts island built on the prompts
from the project director Patrick Jagoda. It resulted in
a chaotic and creatively bustling space with poetry,
vaudeville, DIY tarot, and possibly a Hideo Kojima cameo.
Posts from 2024
16-20 Aug 2024
Built a game in a team of five in 96(ish) hours.
For the jam theme “built to scale” we quickly decided to make scales interconnected. The smallest event is contingent on the largest-scale conditions.
What came out is a cozy and relaxing antigame:
it has no win or loss condition and can play itself if you set the time scale and just watch the plants. There is not much depth to it, but I spent several development hours lulled by the visuals and music.
After the voting ends, I will upload a postmortem build, fixing the old bugs of the current version and adding some new, for posterity.
MA thesis and a game
to prove its point
2023-2024
Games can be riddles for the player:
in my thesis I outline the design philosophy focused on establishing intellectual dialogue with the player and producing new knowledge through play.
To prove that this approach has merit, I applied it to a game about the hardest subject matter I could think of: epistemology. The 21,000 word nonlinear story discusses it in logic, language, and academia .
This is intended to illustrate the capabilities of the approach rather than its intended use. I struggle to imagine the audience for that particular game as is, full of jargon, mechanically confusing and unwieldy.
But with just a bit more time to ease the player into the systems, even a topic as complex as mine can be presented in a way that would let the player engage with the academic debate in the field.
