Second Life Book Fair

The first Book Fair will be held in Second Life this weekend (April 20-22).

“The SL Book Fair brings together publishers, book sellers, authors, book developers, and readers to present and share their ideas around the use of books in Second Life.”

Over 30 companies and individuals will exhibit, including Bantam Dell, Vision, Snowbooks, Conte Verlag, SL Guides, Bruna, Thinc Inc., Jilly Kidd, D Harlan Wilson, Sharon Lee and Steve Miller.  

Contact Poinky Malaprop or the SL Book Fair Group for more info or go to the SL Book Fair office at the Vision Publishing Village (Wallaby 134, 96, 54).

Should be interesting, though, through my conversations with Jilly Kidd it seems that she is working hard to address RL communities more than the SL community… The event will be a good start though, at least for the publishers and authors that are moving into SL for the first time.
 

Sample ARGs

Fro those who have never played an ARG and are interested in understanding them more, here are some sample ARGs.

  • * Dave Szulborski‘s ‘Errant Memories’. A game Szulborski created for beginners. He takes you through the whole process, explains what do in his two books: This is Not a Game, 2005, pp. 343-377 and Through the Rabbit Hole, 2005, pp. 105-132. Szulborksi is a highly regarded ARG designer and the books are an excellent introduction (the only ones around!) to the genre.
  • * John W. Gosney’s ‘Route 66’. Like Szulborski, Gosney guides you through the steps in his book Beyond Reality: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming, 2005, pp: 105-180. It has a strong pedagogical angle in that it can be used in classrooms.
  • * TJ Jackson’s ‘Troy’. It is a small game located at the IGDA ARG SIG site. You can play it and read the post-mortem which explains the process and how it was created.
  • * Andrés Martínez Quijano’s ‘Greg‘.  This one is a bit harder in that you are on your own. Once you figure out just what you have to do to go further (assume you’ve been given all the information you need), he guides you through the process as an ingame narrator of sorts. I think it works because you get to see just what it is like to play an ARG: you start off not knowing if it is one or not, and find ways to figure that out and to find out more.  Andres has just emailed me letting me know he has created a post-mortem. It will be up at the ‘what is an ARG?’ section of the IGDA ARG SIG site shortly, but in the meantime you can download the pdf of Greg: A Sample ARG by Jengibre Interactive here [pdf].

Let me know of any others you recommend.

Twitter and entertainment

Twitter is an application (see on the top of my left sidebar) that allows you to post a 140 character limit message. The basic idea is that you comment on what you are doing. But people are using it in all manner of ways. Here are some ways it is being used in entertainment:

NonFiction:

  • * CNN Breaking News: Headlines as they happen.
  • * SBS: Australia independent broadcaster puts in headlines, news and links to podcasts.

Fiction:

  • * Twitter Novels: Zack Daggy has created the first Twitter Novel, creating one short story with two posts (280 characters) every day.
  • * Captain Malcolm Reynolds: The Captain of the beloved Serenity (Firefly) verse is twittering! This character twitter has some great quotes like “No, you don’t DRIVE a spaceship, you FLY it. Dong ma?”. But only fans of Serenity would understand.
  • * Fox Drive: This is a twitter from Greg Yaitanes, the director of Fox’s new TV show Drive.
  • * Justintv: Justin TV, the 24 hour webcast reality show is also twittered.

In these examples we can see the same approaches that have been applied in podcasts and blogs. It is great to see how people get around the 140 character limit though…and the interaction between twitterers is immediate and direct. It is great to see the director of Drive asking for feedback on the show, Malcolm Reynolds responding to twitter messages and Justintv asking questions.

Let me know of some interesting Twitters you’ve found.