Radical Abundance

How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again.

Here’s my keynote from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference last week. It is my clearest articulation yet of how we’re using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy. This is a lot of what I wanted to talk about at the New School’s “Internet as Playground and Factory” last week.

Murdoch to Google: Search THIS

As unlikely as it sounds, Rupert Murdoch may end up being our last best hope for a peaceful solution to the Internet’s war on professional journalism. A man who many blame for commodifying, globalizing, sensationalizing, and cheapening news is considering taking a stand against a force even bigger than himself: the Web link.

more at the Daily Beast

My Narrative Lab

So, both for fun and in my ongoing effort to find a university homebase, I’m going to teach a course called Narrative Lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program next semester. You have to be in the program to take it, but I’ll try to keep some component online for the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, though, here’s an example of me actually doing interactive narrative – and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we’re after:

But a Vancouver-based studio named Smoking Gun Interactive may be about to merge the worlds of console and alternative reality gaming into one experimental new form. The team has yet to announce a name for the project – its codename is currently X, and there’s an intriguing online preview named, Exoriare, a title drawn from Virgil’s ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor’ – let an avenger arise from my bones.

more…

Exoriare

I just finished a new graphic novel – the first in a series I’m working on that will dig a reality tunnel through the universe of a video game series. Crazy stuff, but I’m the linear guy on the project (if you can believe that) so it’s not quite as brain-decimating as it could be.

Here’s the preview, along with a trailhead:

http://exoriare.com/

It should be available as a printed volume of 120 pages or so in a few months.

Writing for gamers is harder than writing for regular people because I actually feel more obligated to make it work on many levels at once. Gamers spend thousands of hours in a world, so it really has to be true down to levels of granularity an author could ignore in almost any other medium. But it’s great to know people are going as deep into this material as I am. Way more intimate a sensation, really.