ARAC Day 08


List of today’s activities

  1. made it to studio ~9:15
  2. organized hard drives and cables for move later today
  3. played Zelda III for a few minutes
  4. yesterday I read some superficial critiques of fetch quests as well as one guide for DnD on better practices. The guide was written from a point of view that heroes don’t do mundane, quotidian, fetches. The useful bit was the advice that rationale and motivation should be provided for the fetch quests. In DnD this is done in language. I’m trying to figure out how to do this mechanically.
  5. Devin Monnens shared a couple of articles with me this morning. One was from the New Yorker on the history of Choose Your Own Adventure books. Another is a story about a work by Wolf Vostell in the collection of the University of Chicago library. He also shared a link to story about a new release from Google Arts & Culture, a game, set in a contemporary museum and in a time-traveling trip to ancient Mesoamerica.
    1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/09/19/the-enduring-allure-of-choose-your-own-adventure-books
    2. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/vostell-concrete-book-mystery
    3. https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/22/23367413/google-arts-culture-educational-game-ancient-mesoamerica-descent-of-the-serpent
  6. The New Yorker article about CYOA’s central figures, Packard and Montgomery, is lovingly written and thorough, as one would expect from that publication. I would love the footnotes that the magazine feels its readership dislikes.
  7. The Vostell work is firmly in the conceptual art genre. The article is about a quixotic attempt to puzzle out, to resolve, if there is actually paper embedded in a slab of concrete. I think it may be beside the point to know that.
  8. The first paragraph of the Google game frames it troublingly. It says that an ancient Mayan deity has stolen an artifact from a present day museum and the task of the player is to retrieve it. This is a fetch quest. It also frames the reclamation of cultural heritage as theft. I don’t know if the framing is the writer’s or Google’s. Either way its a problem.
  9. I’m doubting if the 6-room cube world is sufficient for Nemo’s Helper. I also wonder if the Exits&Endings are only single tile or capable of defining an entire side of a room as an exit.
  10. I’m going to consult the new Bitsy Docs compilation: https://make.bitsy.org/docs/
  11. I’ve run across a slide deck by Cecile Richard (they/them) who makes splendid bitsy games: http://bit.ly/nywf-bitsy
  12. Making prep to move some of my stuff to another building for tomorrow and the day after. There will be no electricity due to some maintenance on my side of the Anderson Ranch campus.
  13. Okay, have moved laptop and two monitors.
  14. Spent an hour or so outlining one set of quests.
  15. re-read passages from Matematicas en el mundo Nasa.
  16. tried to beat area 3 boss in ratcheteer following advise that suggests hugging a wall to simplify a 2D problem into a 1D one. No luck, and no new insight.
  17. I played the Google game, and yes, it sets you up to retrieve “stolen” artifacts from the museum.
  18. Now my eyes are tired. Gonna call it a night.
  19. I should hashtag these posts I bet: #AndersonRanchArtsCenter