Notices by Allison Parrish (aparrish@mastodon.social), page 11

@Alonealastalovedalongthe I'm using the word "narrative" in the narrow sense of narratology, sorta taking for granted (for the purposes of this discussion) that the structure of a narrative can be separated from the act of its telling (the whole fabula/sujet thing). I think another way of talking about what I'm looking for is games where the elements of abstract narrative structure are explicitly exposed as game mechanics (in interesting ways)

my list of games like this would be something like... Colossal Cave Adventure (a story is rooms and objects); Her Story (a story is a search engine); 80 Days (a story is a directed graph gated by simulation); Fallen London (a story is a deck of cards); etc. (not all from the bast five years obviously, but that's sort of what I'm thinking about)

@panic the band that is my childhood

@enkiv2 @Riley that makes sense. my thought was that sometimes the various empires were large and might have included cities that weren't close enough to riverbeds and marshes for tablets to be easily created on-the-fly? (but really I'm just trying to figure out what would have been the first writing that referred to its own medium and this seemed like a plausible scenario)

@ghost_bird wait what are you talking about? I assumed you'd meant Reigns but maybe not?

@qonnyr I would actually be interested to hear your take, since I played the first episode and it seemed pretty standard-adventure-game-ey to me in terms of structure? been a while since I played it though so I'm probably forgetting some stuff

@casey this toot inspired me to actually play 30 flights which I've owned for like five years now I guess? and it's great! but I'm trying to figure out how to articulate why I don't think it's especially opinionated about narrative in the sense I'm looking for... like the story isn't really a *system* in this game? and the jump cuts and surrealism feel very new-wave cinematic to me, like you could take out the controls and it could be a truffaut short more or less?

@ghost_bird yeah, 80 days is paradigmatic of the kind of games I'm looking for/thinking of

I ask partially because I finished playing _What Remains of Edith Finch_ last night, after buying it partially on the recommendations of people quote-replying that tweet, and I really (really) loved it—but from a "strictly" "formal" perspective it just seemed like Gone Home With More Stuff to me (which in turn was mostly just No Guns Domestic Bioshock). so not really interesting to me specifically on that level

thinking about this birdsite thread
https://twitter.com/StardustCstaway/status/1011657919404937217

and I had a different question, sorta related: what are the games (or other interactive experiences) in the past five years or so that are most opinionated about what a narrative even is, or how a narrative works?

wondering how many other python projects have gh issues that look like this right now (latest version of python made "async" a reserved word) (this is from https://github.com/rq/rq/pulls?q=is%3Apr+is%3Aclosed)

@phooky oh this video is great, thank you for the link :)

idly wondering if there was ever an ancient mesopotamian ledger that recorded the purchase of the clay tablet the ledger itself is written on

there's an essay on rhizome right now about my book and computer-generated poetry and fluxus and modernism and a whole lot of things i guess! https://rhizome.org/editorial/2018/jul/10/an-excess-of-consciousness-1/

I have learned just enough chinese to be able to also sometimes recognize a handful of kanji when looking at japanese text and it feels like this weird unexpected superpower

@enkiv2 no entries on here as far as I can tell for the bittersweet vertiginous melancholy I get from seeing people valiantly trying to use increasingly detailed ontologies to understand the fundamentally ineffable