ImpactGames

PlaytheNewsGame, Winner of a James Knight Foundation Best News Game)

GeoVol

All that remains is this news story.

WikiStrat

Most of the older blue bordered reports have substantial contributions from yours truly.

Parametric Press

NB: This is a work in progress, Parametric Press has commissioned this game and I’m in the process of working with them and their team. (Link to working outline)

The story I want to write is very location- and decision-based which is why I think it needs an interactive interface – plus I like the idea of the decisions being made having consequences for the reader/player. There was a Native American college in Oklahoma (Bacone College) that used to be one of the best in the country, particularly for a kind of peculiar style of art called Flat Style painting — a kind of sleek modern 50s interpretation of Native American visual culture — they used to let artists live on the campus in exchange for letting them teach a few classes and that they left some of their work. Fifty years later and the campus is destitute, they can’t pay professors, yet it’s filled with dusty, decaying art. 

You play an adjunct art professor. I’d like to write what seems like crime drama taking place in the college (in that the inciting incident would be deciding to make off with some art work) but gradually would explore some of the complex racial and financial dynamics at play in a ruined Southern Baptist tribal university. South Eastern Indian culture was so thoroughly eradicated that what remains is largely a construct; there’s also the ethics of stealing, and then the escape itself. 

My technical skills aren’t too bad. Besides a somewhat experimental body of work (my most recent creative essay was for a cryptocurrency magazine and was a ‘decentralized history of Bitcoin’) I have experience writing copy for games (I used to be the editorial lead for a serious game called PlaytheNewsGame). And I would imagine keeping this to about four potential endings (meaning lots of overlapping forks). My programming skills are limited to basic HTML for now but am willing and eager to learn.

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