Reviews
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-- Less Is More: Chinese Menu Quest Systems & Storytelling
August 2003. First in a series of articles on virtual worlds with an emphasis on writing and storytelling. It is a critique of basic quests found in Dark Age of Camelot and Star Wars Galaxies and how they effect immersion and storytelling.
-- The Quest for Story: NPC Quests in Star Wars Galaxies
September 2003. Second in the series of articles on virtual worlds with an emphasis on writing and storytelling. Here we take a look at the higher level quests in Star Wars Galaxies.
-- When a Story Arc Doesn't
November 2003. Final article in the series on writing for virtual worlds completes the look at Star Wars: Galaxies.
-- Building a Virtual World Writing Team
October 2003. This article became the basis for an appendix in Character Development and Storytelling for Games.
-- DAOC: Using Player Achievements to Open New Zones
December 2001. A post to the MUD-Dev forum suggesting ways to allow players' actions to reveal new content in Dark Age of Camelot, a procedure followed two years later by the MMO Horizons.
-- An Analysis of High Level Game Play in EQ
November 2000. This was originally five posts in an EQ forum signed by my perennial character Skyrain Dreamweaver.
-- Don Quixote as Modular Storytelling
A response I gave in a news group circa 2000 when someone wrote that he couldn't see how modular storytelling worked exactly. It is the inspiration for a small section in Character Development and Storytelling for Games.
-- Storytelling in The Gryphon Tapestry
An email I wrote to Raph Koster discussing storytelling and "instancing" in TGT circa 1999.
-- Movies and Games: Marriage Shows Signs of Success
A 1996 New York Times article featuring quotes from Chris Roberts and me on that year's convergence of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Plus ça change, plus ça meme chose.
-- Dynamic Entertainment
PR hype I wrote in 1995 for Scott Walcheck, then president of Sanctuary Woods, to differentiate our adventure games from our competitors. While as far as I know no one else has ever seen it, it is the first formal attempt to outline a modular approach to storytelling, and portions of it have shown up in later talks.
-- Stalking the Wild Gamestory
Published 1995. Article for Computer Games and Strategy Plus magazine. Several seeds for my GDC tutorials began to sprout here.
-- Let's Put the Play Back in Games
Published December 1995. Article for the German magazine PC Games.
-- Wax Poetic Article
Published spring 1987. Written for the Poe Studies Association Newsletter at The Pennsylvania State University/DuBois Campus. It gives some background on a script I wrote for the TV show Blacke's Magic.
No Non-Fiction Trunk as yet.