How to find and tell your story

"When we think about bringing interactive fiction into the classroom we often focus on the technology. I’ve written here about using accessible tools such as Twine, Twine 2.0, Inform 7, and Inklewriter to create everything from games to interactive essays and digital humanities projects. Bringing in software of this type can be a great way to transform an assignment and add procedural literacy outcomes to a range of disciplines. However, before we get into the technology, we need an idea."

Read the full article to find out more about these exercises that provide playful starting points to making interactive narratives:

• Interactive Fiction Party Game
• Create Your Own Writing Adventure
• Existing Generative Games

"Fort McMoney is a documentary game. As a player your role is to explore the oil town of Fort McMurray, Canada, in the heart of the Athabasca oil sands development. You ‘meet’ characters and ‘vote’ on issues; scouring the interface for clues you aim to sway others through your posts. While Fort McMoney is playful it clearly shares documentary’s serious intent: in Fort McMoney ‘everything is real: the places, events, the characters.’ To play is to engage with the political, social and ecological issues of oil production.

Fort McMoney is part of a growing collection of works that marry the social, political and aesthetic ambitions of documentary with the forms and representational possibilities of digital media. Documentary makers are actively exploring new ways of telling stories and engaging audiences and they are doing so with reference both to new technologies and the idea of documentary – it’s techniques, aesthetics and critically, its social functions."

Read the full article to find out more about the changing world of documentary.  Be sure to check out the Fort McMoney trailer or play the documentary game.

Via mirmilla, Davduf, siobhan-o-flynn