The Last Express

"Narrative to me is an area that's evolved the least in games over the past 10 to 15 years. They're more beautiful than they've ever been, they're more fun to play, the controls are better, and they're more fluid, and yet they're not telling better stories. They're not better at telling stories than they were 15 years ago, and I don't feel like they're trying."

From an interview from a couple of the leads on Jordan Mechner's The Last Express, the 1997, critical success that, for other reasons, ended up being a commercial failure. I had never heard of the game, but its art nouveau rotoscoped style, it's emphasis on real-time gameplay and ambitious interactivity (having to be in a certain place at a certain time to hear a certain conversation, for example) has caused me to look the game up on ebay. I'll post something after I've played through it.

The article is here.

Immersion

An interesting art/research project by Robbie Cooper.

"There is an account, apocryphally, from medieval times, of a person walking into a room and being confronted with the sight of a man transfixed. The man in the room is holding something in his hands, staring at it. His eyes are glazed. His lips are moving soundlessly. His soul is elsewhere. The onlooker, unsettled, concludes that the man has been possessed by an evil spirit. In fact, he is simply doing something the onlooker has never seen done before: reading a book..."



The full story is here.