Something different for me: I’ve coauthored a poster/presentation (“Faking and Re-Making: The Use of Emotional Responses and Creative Resonances in Communal Multimedia Storytelling”) with Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo that’ll be presented tomorrow, October 15, at Fan Studies Network North America 2023!
It’s connected to my overall recent move toward academic pursuits (that I should, uh, really write a post about…), but a big reason to drop in to this virtual conference if you have the chance is that our “poster” was invited to be multimedia… so, naturally, we decided to write a text game:
Folks who attend the conference will have first shot at reading/playing “Building the Spear,” where:
The year is 1718…
…And this is the world of Blow the Man Down, where clever pirate captains Olivier Levasseur and Sam Bellamy, each pursuing the same vast treasure of Spanish gold, meet up and—through storms, enemy fleets, and their combined delight in codes and hidden messages—eventually fall in love.
You, though, are just a simple pirate who’s woken up in a strange place—and with no idea who you are or how you got there. Through your choices, you piece together your memories…and create your own place within the BTMD universe.
(For those who listen to the No Story Is Sacred podcast, we talked extensively about Blow the Man Down there as well, including its origin as an element in an alternate-universe game.)
Naomi, Shivhan, and I intend to link the game-poster and presentation publicly afterward, but if you want to see yours truly live (and have a chance to share your game results early) FSNNA 2023 is the way to go.
(Image credit: Image by Fan Studies Network North America)