Over the last ten years, the gaming industry has seen huge innovations in how games are able to tell stories. From creative use of new technologies to an emphasis on the player’s experience of a particular narrative, several innovative games have shaped the way games are played, and also how they are viewed by non-gamers and academe.

We’ve been asking some of the best scholars and critics of games to single out one important game from the past decade. We start with Jim Whitehead from the University of California at Santa Cruz, who is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on WebDAV.

Facade is the breakthrough game of the decade because it demonstrates that you can have dialog-driven gameplay with rich characters where the player has a large degree of influence over what transpires. In the game, you take on the role of a friend of a 20-something married couple, Trip and Grace, interacting with them via conversational natural language. Trip and Grace respond to you--and each other--in real time, both with spoken and body language. During the game, you help the couple work through deep troubles in their relationship, and how you talk to them determines whether they stay together, split apart, or throw you out of their apartment.

Today, the typical computer game provides shallow choices for talking with other characters. You are limited to a small number of choices in what to say, and many times these choices have limited to no effect on the game. Dialog is arranged in large trees of predefined choices and responses. Characters seemingly forget what they have said to you in the past, or say things that expose serious continuity problems. In contrast, Trip and Grace in Facade have internal emotional models, conversational models, and goals they are trying to achieve in their interactions with each other, and the player. They have some ability to remember what you have said. This leads to open conversation that can run in many potential directions, and a feeling of freedom of expression in your interactions. You can literally say anything to these characters.

Facade is not without flaws. Though the faces of Trip and Grace are fully procedural, an impressive feat where they are generated by the computer on-the-fly while the game is running, they compare poorly with the artistry of professional games. Like any work of fiction, a willingness to engage the world as-presented is important to preserve the illusion of reality. It is certainly possible to find the limits of Facade. In one example, a player pretends they have been shot in the street before entering Trip and Grace's apartment; Trip offers the player a drink. But, at its best, Facade makes you feel like you are really in that apartment, adrenaline flowing, nervous, struggling along with Trip and Grace to find a way out, to discover what you can possibly say to make the other person *understand*, to make everything all right. But just like in the real world, sometimes that isn't possible.

Jo Walton examines the joy of an unfinished series , arguing that an unfinished series leaves us wondering, speculating, and (in my opinion most-importantly) talking about what might come.

If you come face to face with James Clavell in the afterlife, my advice is to tell him first how much you like his books, before asking if he’s had time up there to finish Hag Struan.

Of course, many of us read hypertext narratives serially. Hypertext naturally lends itself to open-ended narrative, and the joy of an unfinished series is relevant whether we’re talking about a hypertext series or just an exceptionally long hypertext. And with the immediacy of Web publishing and hypertext’s ability to be constantly changing and expanding, there’s very little real difference between the two anymore.

Greg Costikyan reviews his narrative improv game Sweet Agatha for Play This Thing! , noting nuances of the mechanics in relation to their predecessors from the game world. Allen draws parallels to the similarities to classic role-playing games through “The Truth” player and “The Reader” player’s speech and roles in narrative building. He also offers interesting insight on the game’s tone:

One of its strengths, and most interesting aspects, is its tone of elegiac melancholy -- not uncommon in noir fiction (and noir is one direction in which you could take the story), but exceedingly rare in a game of any kind.

The piece is excerpted from Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010).

The software bills itself as “Digital Storytelling” software “used to discover the threads connecting peoples’ lives across time and place.” Indeed one could certainly see it as a database of the links between people, times, and places and the natural narratives that emerge from these intersections. It could also provide a useful tool for creating visual hypertext literature that takes advantage of linking people in images, adding text, and using Google Maps for a fun added dimension of realism. A Carmen Sandiego-style mystery immediately comes to mind, however I’m sure a clever author could come up with a very interesting way of using MemoryMiner’s tools to create an immersive narrative experience.

The idea behind StoryTrek is that authors could combine their digital texts with geospatial location systems to provide location-specific text. Reading the text on her phone, the reader might be traversing the text as she walks, only to read a passage about arriving at a brook as she does so in the real world. Going a bit further might reveal a passage about dipping one’s feet into the water and so forth.

This final session was wrought with technical failure, but as several conference attendees pointed out, if there was a crowd in all of academe that could appreciate and analyze this failure, it was digital humanists. Mark Bernstein tweeted to ask whether this was failure or just “excessively ergodic” interaction. After the session, I had a lovely talk with Brian Greenspan discussing how Rita Raley’s digital disfiguration was like an uncanny bit of art—her face blurred beyond the point of being humanly identified, leaving only the clear image of her eyes floating above the pixelated canvas where her face should be.

Though the video sessions certainly had their difficulties, the malfunctions were more of a launching point for interesting discussion than actual failures. As with the rest of the conference, there were many interesting ideas introduced and discussed.

While in Boston for Eastgate’s Tinderbox Weekend Event on March 13-14, Felix Kuehn & Alex Strick van Linschoten will be at the Harvard Coop on Friday March 12 discussing My Life with the Taliban , an autobiography of Abdul Salam Zaeef, former senior member of the Taliban.

Editors Felix Kuehn & Alex Strick van Linschoten will discuss this harrowing autobiography by Taliban member Abdul Salam Zaeef. The book begins with the author’s early childhood before turning to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Zaeef’s decision to join the mujahideen resistance. Countering conventional accounts that the Taliban emerged in the 1990s, Zaeef maintains that the movement existed as early as the 1970s. The author traces his rise in the Taliban to his appointment as ambassador to Pakistan in 2000, and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment in Guantnamo Bay after September 11 and the fall of the Taliban regime.

Discussion and book signing will take place 7:00-8:30 PM on Friday March 12.

Most importantly, the hyper-orthogonal structure allows the user to enter data in two or three dimensions, then create additional dimensions without disturbing those first dimensions.

ZigZag certainly disrupts a common understanding of spatial relation, but once you understand it, the implications and uses for it are myriad and limitless.