A few relevant links found their way to my inbox this week. Let’s have a look.

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I just got back from Montreal, where I was attending the International Communication Association 2008 conference. Due to cost and scheduling issues, I wasn’t able stay for as long as I might have liked, but even in the couple days I was there, I got to see some thought-provoking presentations and meet some interesting people. Here are a few things I wanted to make note of before I forget. Find out more information about these panels in the ICA conference program (PDF link).

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Things have been busy with non-web writing lately, and are about to get busier, so updates may be sparse (or, I suppose, absent) around here for at least another week or so. Tomorrow I’m headed to Montreal shortly for the International Communication Association 2008 conference, presenting a paper on experimental comics and the concept of visual language. In the meantime, here’s a few links I’m not sure what to do with, but which seemed interesting enough to post.

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As you might have guessed from some of my earlier posts, I’m fascinated by storytelling in video games, but I also feel like there are some severe impediments to narrative engagement in the way games are currently designed. I find it useful to criticize what games might be doing that actively screws up narrative engagement, like letting your protagonist die repeatedly, but in a way, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. An even greater issue, I’d argue, is in the range of input and interaction techniques that games offer, effectively pre-determining what kinds of stories get told.

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All right, here are all the links that didn’t make it to one of the “themed” posts I did recently. Please pardon me if you suggested one of these links a long, long time ago and I forgot to give you credit—they’ve been sitting in my bookmarks folders for pretty much forever now.

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