Paper trail
15 September 2005. No comments yet. Inspired by a sudden urge to see what academia was like.
For a lark back in August, I gave an academic paper at the University of Nottingham's Science Fiction(s) day. I was particularly pleased to see that my badge had "Andrew Losowsky - Independent Scholar" written on it (next to a holographic star), and positively delighted when the day began with a girl wearing a pirate bandana, showing us slides of Cthulu.
Anyway, my paper was on Alternate Reality Gaming and a future of narrative. The 'a' is important. Unlike some, I don't believe that ARGs will ever become much more than a niche activity, although that niche still has great potential for growth.
I do, however, think that the genre has created some exciting possibilities for interactive narrative far beyond the hypertext novels that had always struck me as slightly disappointing. My intention with this paper was to document some of these possibilities in an accessible way.
If you weren't one of the 15 people who saw it delivered in the flesh, or even if you were (and thanks to the pirate girl for her suggestions on conspiracy theorists), here's an updated version of my paper, now submitted for publication and available for download. As it says at the bottom, usual by-nc-sa/2.5 rules apply.
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