I thought I would share a couple of “Near Future” short stories I have written recently with you. Hope you enjoy them 🙂
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Review: Eating Robots by Stephen Oram
For openness, I was sent a copy of the book to review.
A rare book review from me. Every now and again, thanks to previously running a review site, I get asked to review stuff. In this case, it was a book of short stories titled Eating Robots and other stories, by the author Stephen Oram.
I love dystopian stories, having even written several myself in the past. For me the future is anything but bright, depending on how you look at it. One of the best representations of using this dystopian “lens” has always been the T.V. series Black Mirror from the brilliant Charlie Brooker.
Her Story, Gone Home and Narrative Atoms
Last week I wrote about Narrative Atoms in some details. They are basically small nuggets of narrative that can stand on their own but together build the bigger story.
Two obvious examples that I totally forgot about are the game / narrative experiences of Her Story and Gone Home.
Her Story is the fabulous creation of Sam Barlow. You take the role of investigator, reviewing a police archive of video footage of a British woman accused of murder. You can access the footage in any order you like, gleaning more clues and information with every video you watch. Sometimes the videos will not make sense until you find the video that came before it, others give you all you need in just a few seconds of footage. The joy is discovering how the story fits together, jumping back and forward through the timeline. New snippets of information give you new ideas on what to search in the archive, leading to many “Ahahaa” moments.
School Grades Are The Wrong Way Around
I often hear people say that school is just a badly designed game. I have to agree. I also hear a lot that part of the problems is people chasing grades rather than mastery and that grades should be dropped. I have to partially disagree.
I totally agree that school should be about master, not grade chasing, but I don’t agree we should get rid of grades, just redesign them. For me, grades are the wrong way around. The assumption is that we start at an A* and we either maintain that or the grade can fluctuate wildly assignment to assignment. If we were to follow a more game-like approach, we would consider progress and experience points rather than ever changing grades.
Gamification Design Framework Toolkit
Gamification Design Framework toolkit has been created as a way to help you design better gamified solutions. It is based on my Gamification Design Framework, a systematic way of building solutions that I have developed over the years.