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Author Archives: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Heavy Rain vs Façade?

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: February 23, 2010

“Façade tried to solve this problem by replacing the parrot with something more like a brain-damaged human; Heavy Rain, by comparison, is probably the best-trained parrot in history.” From Archie Bland’s Control freak: Will David Cage’s ‘Heavy Rain’ videogame push our buttons?

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Help Heather Over the Finish Line

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: January 31, 2010

Heather Logas only has through tomorrow to make the crowdsourced funding goal for her indie storygame — or all the funding pledged so far is lost. Heather describes the game by saying: Remember those Choose your own Adventure books you used to love as a kid? The game is a bit like that, if it […]

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Playable Fictions MFA deadline nears

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: January 30, 2010

At UC Santa Cruz, the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program is organized around collaborative research groups. For those applying this year (deadline February 15th) I’ll be leading a group on the theme “Playable Fictions.” This is a great way for writers, game designers, and related sorts of digital media artists to get an […]

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Help Us Bring Deeper Characters to Kodu

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: January 27, 2010

EIS PhD student Teale Fristoe spent last summer at Microsoft Research working on Kodu, the exciting new platform for game creation. Now we’re developing a proposal to extend Kodu with support for deeper characters, social situations, and dynamic stories — providing the first high-level computational support for the kinds of games that research shows girls […]

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Uncharted 2‘s Sloppy Fiction

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: December 30, 2009

The design of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves should make integrating gameplay and fiction easier in two particular ways. First, it’s linear, so there’s no need to worry about unexpected traversals of the fictional space. Second, it’s almost entirely scripted — a matter of how adeptly things are accomplished, rather than what approach is taken or […]

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Frank Lantz at UCSC

By Noah Wardrip-Fruin | Published: November 14, 2009

Distinguished Lecture: Frank Lantz Interim Director, NYU Game Center and Creative Director, Area/Code Wednesday, Nov 18th, 2-3:30pm Engineering 2, room 506 “Innovations in Game Design: Through Practice to Theory” Frank Lantz is the Creative Director and co-Founder of Area/Code, a New York based developer that creates cross-media, location-based, and social network games. He has been […]

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