"A lot of design is very good at stories; far less design is good at plot–and I’m convinced that we need the latter if we want design to serve, as Jack Schulze puts it, as a form of  “cultural invention” instead of problem-solver." Strong stuff on design fiction, the value of urban fantasy, and considering possible realities.

"Children will turn anything into a toy, any toy into a game and any game into a story. Adults do just the same thing, they just don’t do the noises. At least not when anyone’s looking." Yes. (Also: Sorrell is blogging. This is good.)

"I think there’s a lesson here for a lot of transmedia, augmented reality, and other buzzword-based story-telling forms: it’s not what you do with the technology, it’s what you leave to the imagination." This is nice, and right, and Matt's point is right because it was true for every other kind of storytelling anyhow. We just have new ways to leave it to the imagination.

"The One Page Dungeon Contest is level design contest for creating a scripted RPG adventure that fits on one 8.5x11 page. All information, the map, story, encounters and more have to fit in one page. Sort of writing a haiku, short and sweet.

The dungeons are RPG-system neutral and vary greatly in style. Several are classic hack-and-slash dungeon-crawls, while others involve mysteries, horror, solitaire play and lots more." Sounds great.

"Curveship is an interactive fiction system that provides a world model (of characters, objects, locations, and things that happen) while also modeling the narrative discourse, so that the narration and description of the simulated world can change. Curveship can tell events out of order, using flashback and other techniques, and can tell the story from the standpoint of particular characters and their perceptions and understandings." This looks both bonkers and brilliant.

"Too many times proponents of interactive fiction talk as if it’s a new thing, as if interactivity were never part of the reading experience. How many of us has written in the margin of a book, turned down a corner of a page or smoothed the book back at a particular passage, felt our attention wander as we gaze out the window? We each interpret a story in different ways; it’s how we can re-read a book without getting bored, or watch the same film twice." This is cracking stuff from Kat; I am glad she's written it down.

"Today's video is 'Boys vs Girls', showing the relative points and badges etc. accumulated by boys vs. girls over the course of the day. It ends with a "get running, girls!" message, and I love that data visualization is being used as a way for a brand to tell a story, in something close to real time, in a specific way tailored to the events on the ground."

Jamie Fristrom on collaborative-storytelling-RPGs. Lots of good links and thoughts here - especially the line about White Wolf's "disenfranchising" of the player by calling the GM (of all people) a "storyteller".

You know, it's thing like this that make me really wish I had the time to devote to properly grokking Dwarf Fortress, because sod the pictures, it's just a brilliant _story_.

"It now seems morally important to me to do without minor characters in a story. Any character who appears, however briefly, deserves to have his or her life story fully respected and told."

"I thought this was a fascinating take on the need within companies for stories... Companies spend a lot of money looking for these stories. Traditional product companies had to ask people and users to tell their stories, normally through market research. Web companies are at a huge advantage: they have rivers of usage data flowing through their servers, and the problem inverses – how to make sense and tease out meaning and interest from such a torrent." This is very good; I'm looking forward to future installments.

I could, charmlessly and redundantly, expand on that to say: when life surprises us, making the everyday strange and wonderful, our first impulse is to make stories. These are of course personal stories: the volcano itself is too remote, too vast, to fit into our little narratives. Like Vonnegut’s glaciers, they just exist: human lives happen around them.

Post-Eyjafjallajökull microfiction.

"Nethack does what computers do best - what computers were invented for. It hands you a symbolic representation of something, and lets you interact with it. The symbols are utterly mundane ... but the interaction is extraordinarily complicated. Interacting with the game of Nethack can be glorious, frustrating, hilarious, and satisfying. Like any great game, it's even fun to watch and talk about when played by others. There are probably more web pages of people telling their Nethack war stories than there are pages discussing the game itself.

This is one of those pages. I'm writing this because, after twenty years of playing, I finally completed the game." It's quite a tale, and full of glimpses of secrets I never discovered. Always more of a rogue man.

"Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form." Yes. This is a good one.

"Ultimately, when I reject narrative techniques in favor of ludic ones, what I am really saying is that I reject traditional authorship. I reject the notion that what I think you will find emotionally engaging and compelling - and then build and deliver to you to consume - is innately superior to what you think is emotionally compelling. By extension, I reject the idea that I can make you feel the loss of a friend in a more compelling way by authoring an irreversible system than you could make yourself feel by playing with a system wherein a friend can be both dead and alive simultaneously and wherein his very existence can be in flux based on your playful whim... This discussion is not about how to make a game more meaningful. It is about how games mean." Yep, I still want to marry Clint Hocking.

"I'm continually drawn in by the belief that everyone finds their own way through life, age, cities, networks, whatever. And as Meehan's tale recounts, it's the whispers we leave on the wind that entice others to follow our hints." Just go and read the story; it's wonderful, and the fragments George picks out so carefully constructed. That made my evening.

"What if Ulysses had been written before the construction of Dublin? That is, what if Dublin did not, in fact, precede and inspire Joyce's novel, but the city had, itself, actually been derived from Joyce's book?" Geoff Manaugh expands on a comment he made at Thrilling Wonder Stories; the stuff about 'quipu' is also awesome.

Well Played is now out, and can be read online and purchased from Lulu. It's exactly the sort of thing I've wanted for a while - a reader for videogames, and for the actual experiential side of them - and it's got some great authors contributing pieces on a host of games. Worth your time, for sure.

"If you keep the city and concentrate on putting more world into it, imaginativeness becomes the primary obstacle-- you can add things into this city without having to add much physical space and new assets. There's legions of empty storefronts and empty buildings, waiting to be filled. And media-- web sites, radio stations, tv shows-- don't take up space either. Think of this cheap empty space as a place to tell new stories, because as a developer, you are good at this." Iroquois, hitting many nails on the head all at once, again.

A story, between two people, told through email. Not looking like email; actually, originally, told over email. Now, it can only be read in order - but once, it would have been delivered. Can't imagine how striking it might have been.

"That is, the activity of making kleos, as a bard or as a player, is about forming an affinity group—people who think the game is a cool game, who want to talk about it, who would go to the mat for it. It’s about making fanboys. Odysseus is going to turn the Phaeacians into Odysseus fanboys, just as the bard of Odyssey 9 is going to turn his audience into fanboys of the Odyssey, just as he the bard is already such a fanboy."

A strong article from Joe on some guidelines, based on experience, for writing RSpec user stories.

""When people tell me about playing a game and tell me what happened to them, then I hear how different their stories are," he says. "To me, that's an indicator of how good the game is."" Will Wright hits the nail on the head.

"We can now deal with forms in the language of our stories, something that the customer understands and relates to." Webrat lets you navigate your Rails app through the DOM, rather than HTTP.

Good navigation tells a story, and good stories have a beginning, middle, and end.

Lovely, in-depth interview full of cracking quotations. Definitely worth a read.