Summary of week three in Italian
Grandi Magazzini Di Settimio Severo
On the Italian version of this blog I have now added a summary of the week three topics.
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Versailles 1685
I ran a session for a group of Masters’ students yesterday, part of the 3D Recording, Modelling and Interpretation module. It was a great afternoon, with a really responsive group of students, who ended up planning  a game around the Mayan city state of Tulum.
I talked for about an hour, beforehand.
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Italian translation of Week Two topics
Terrazza di Traiano
On the Italian version of this post I have provide a brief summary of the activities for week two. Feel free to post any queries in Italian to me via twitter.
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The Sun Stands Still
Just a little plug for The Sun Stands Still, a very short Unity based point and click adventure. Naomi Alderman, the author behind it, had a little bit to say about emotions and narrative on the BBC World Service’s Click programme:
Games have access to emotions of agency  which you can’t necessarily get when you are audience-member or a reader.
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Italian translation of week one topics
Excavating a burial at PortusPhoto: Hembo Pagi
Once again Eleonora has translated the summaries of the week one activities into Italian in order to support sharing of the course via Italian social media. As discussed previously the course itself runs in English and it is not possible to moderate the posts on the FL platform in English and Italian. This would require Italian speakers on the FutureLearn platform which is monitored 24 hours a day.
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Ludology vs Narratology Revisited
My previous post on the Ludology vs Narratology debate is one of my most visited, and I note that that the term frequently appears in searches that bring people to this site. So, in the spirit of “give the people what they want”, let me offer up this morsel.
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Kernels and Satellites
Last week I reminded myself that I hadn’t sought out Cohen and Shires’ Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction, which had been referenced in an article on game narrative. It was low down my list of priorities, mainly because it was written in 1988 – which feels like ancient history in citation terms.
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Narrative Structure and Games – Backstory?
I’ve started writing up my literature review. And that has sent me back to the literature itself, to try and make head or tale of the cryptic comments I made to myself when I read it the fist time. Take for example Barry Ip’s two part article in Games and Culture, Narrative Structures in Computer and Video Games. Ip offers, in part one, his own pretty complete literature review of story in games.
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GamAR at the National Maritime Museum
Some time ago I read about the GamAR app for mobile devices. Which allows visitors to a number of heritage sites to download a (sometimes free, sometimes paid for) Augmented Reality Game based around the site. Last week I finally got to give it a go, when I visited the National Maritime Museum. The app had been sitting unused on my iPad for months. Now I had the oppurtunity to download a game a take it to the museum.
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It’s easy… when you know how
It feels like I’ve spent the best part of four days learning Linux. Lets be specific (because I’ve discovered, you have to be specific), I’ve been learning the RedHat distro of Linux which does somethings differently to, for example, Ubunto. Oh, and I’ve been learning the Windows Command prompt syntax as well, all to get a Minecraft Portus up on to the University’s Minecraft server.
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