TomMannino.com

I fully and readily admit to LARPing quite extensively in high school. This caught my eye, because I’ve always been a fan of Shadowrun, (while I admit to never actually playing a game, I’ve made several characters and almost played in two games,) and of course a fan of cyberpunk. These people set up a Shadowrun LARP using laser tag weaponry and did it in a really awesome and fitting warehouse setting. Very, very cool.

LARPing to me is one of the more pure forms of interactive storytelling. It’s a game, it’s acting, it’s storytelling. It’s also ruined by negative stereotypes and it’s my experience that most of the people that tend to do it are super obsessed with it and make it their life.

I think I would enjoy some sort of convention or amusement park setting where everyone who was attending was a ‘character,’ the boundaries and time limits and rules were clear, and you could play as a character for a weekend or whatever.

shadowrun: Shadowrun LARP

This was up for a Webby if I’m not mistaken. It’s an awesome look at the history and evolution of video games from a very basic perspective. Very well done, and something I’m very interesting in. It teaches and shows the user things while they interact with the experience using casual game mechanics. This is obviously instead of watching a video or clicking through a sideshow, which you could have done to display the same information.

People understand games.

I, Videogame – Discovery Channel

Ren’Py is an engine that supports the creation of visual novels and dating sims, forms of computer-mediated storytelling. It supports a movie script-like syntax that makes creating simple games easy, while still being customizable and extensible by advanced creators. With no additional work by the game-maker, it supports features expected of all visual novels, like loading, saving, preferences, and rollback.

I’ve always been interested in this concept of creating a ’storytelling engine.’  This one in particular is based heavily on Python and has you writing a lot of scripts.  In this case, this is one of those things I know I could do myself in Flash, but the fact that someone took the time to make a universal engine is appealing to me, in that I *wouldn’t* have to do it myself in Flash.

The appeal of these things is that the time saved from not having to do it yourself can be spent on better telling a story.  This is the main appeal to me.  I’m not sure how complicated the games can be, but when you refer to them as “visual novels” it suddenly becomes more acceptable to make them just narrative-heavy interactive works of fiction.  It’s worth trying out.

http://www.renpy.org/wiki/renpy/Home_Page