Jamie Antonisse

It's official... in less than twelve hours we'll be on the road. The team's been working on this project for 16 months, and I can still remember the event that started it all... our six-week push for IGF 2009.

What we made was rough, borderline nonsensical, and bears no resemblance to what we have now (and entirely new brand of nonsense).

But we were proud (and I'm proud now) not because we've made something perfect, but because we've constantly, through our joint efforts, made something unique, something beyond what any one of us could imagine.

There's light at the end of the tunnel... wish us luck!

It's February 17th, and Winterbottom is now an official XBLA download (800 points). Tell your friends!

Some of the best times of my life were weekends spent filming movie previews with my Pure West buddies. We'd make our own two minute versions of the films we wished existed, mocking every genre we could reach along the way.

I'm still out here, but they have continued the grand tradition with Full Hack. A story of winners, losers, lovers, and minature beanbags. Check it out!

With the start of Indiecade, Andre, RJ, John and I have officially formed The Peanut Gallery. By our powers combined, we will make Awesome!

Here's our site: http://www.peanutgallerygames.com

And collectively, we have two games at Indiecade this weekend... Minor Battle and Spectre! Come check them out!

Two bits of news, equally exciting!

The first is that Spectre, which some of you may have seen at last year's IMD thesis show, is now available as a Mac or PC download, free of charge.

The second is that we'll be showing the game at Indiecade next week!

If you want to know more about the game (or the amazing team of IMD students that made it happen) , we have a newly minted website: http://www.spectregame.com. Download Spectre, try it out, leave a comment with your thoughts! I've also included a trailer below the fold.

Continue reading "Spectre: Free Download/Indiecade" »

Second Skin, a documentary on hardcore MMO gamers, is coming to Los Angeles for a one week theatrical run, starting tonight!

Thanks to some help from me and a few other friends, the director, Juan Carlos Pineiro, has driven (that's right, DRIVEN) out from New York to attend the LA premiere. He's going to be holding a Q&A; at the Friday shows, and probably some of the Saturday shows as well. I'll be there at the 9:30 show tonight (Friday) if anyone wants to meet up.

Buy tickets online here.

Continue reading "Second Skin - Tonight and All This Week" »

At E3 2009, Microsoft unleashed a demon.

A week has gone by, and for most of us the words Project Natal already mean something. In case they don't, let me try to sum it up: it's a game platform where you don't need a controller. You just sit (or stand) in front of the screen, and move, and things happen.

Continue reading "Requiem for the A Button" »

May 9-15, 2009

Full details at http://interactive.usc.edu/thesis2009.

This is a sneaky way to get some feedback on my thesis paper: I'm posting section one to the blog. This first part runs through a lite history of interactive narrative, and argues that role-playing games form the dominant paradigm for almost all our interactive stories. I've taken out the footnotes for your reading sanity... but everthing else is intact. What do you think? Is this readable? Sensical? Rife with grammatical no-no's? Read! Discuss! Please???

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Joseph Wheeler has lived a full life… seventy-three long, strange years lay behind him. With time, however, his memory has thinned, and now he can only remember a few fleeting moments. Spectre is a new interactive narrative that explores this character’s experiences, and uses play to examine the idea that no one “story” can do a person justice.

Continue reading "All Your Games are RPGs" »

I came across this gem while researching Hypertext for my paper... a naive, hilarious and wonderful view of Interactive Media circa 1990. Leave it to Douglas Adams to get it so wrong, yet so right.

If it's all getting little too linear for you, try skipping around... I guarantee you'll encounter some classic out-of-context BBC action.