oh by the way

it's probably worth mentioning that i am in the middle of my dissertation now. i've settled on investigating implicit communication in virtual environments (as in GAMES but not really games because apparently that makes my paper not very good). which is interesting because it was actually one of the topics i was looking into last year.

so i'm making a cluedo type of murder mystery game - point and click style (and on the ipad for some reason...). and you play the game and afterwards i ask you to describe what happened, story-wise. secretly however there's also some small stories going on in the background about the characters themselves, nothing to do with the murder (like an affair, or one of the characters has a drinking problem or whatever).

i'm making a tool where you can choose which out of a list of these kinds of stories you want to tell in the background, and how obvious (or how implicit) you want them to be. when it comes to the person playing the murder mystery (which is explicit) i wait for anyone to mention the implicit parts of the story and hopefully along the way prove that having these little implicit parts makes the story richer and gives the user (player) a deeper understanding of that world.

cool right?

also it gives me a great excuse to read a lot of game designer stuff on environmental storytelling. if designers would only get off their asses and write some research papers rather than articles on gamasutra, i'd be having a great time...