public posts?
In just a few days I’ll be starting work on an interdisciplinary humanities PhD at Concordia University in Montreal. I’ve spent the last two weeks getting settled in here. It’s lovely here but moving was hard. I thought that when I moved to California and back for my MFA work, that would be the last move I had in me. Naturally I would have to stay in Texas to be near my mother. When I got back I found, like a lot of my friends had, that Austin had become pretty uninhabitable to me outside the bubble of my own house. Outrageous prices, political hostility, ecological precarity, and most of all a lack of meaningful, stable work. I started compacting down with the rest of the sediment at the bottom of a deep lake of depression that was only allievated by continuing the work that I had started at UCLA— mainly three large writing projects, one expanding from each of the chapters of the thesis I had written. Small game prototypes supported each project. I had a little survey show of some of these early projects at The Museum of Human Achievement in 2024, and one of those prototypes has now ballooned up into a toolkit for making dungeon games that I hope to develop into a sort of Bitsy for roguelikes. I also gave a talk to my friend and past advisor Danny Snelson’s electronic literature class about interactive fiction and uses of the text parser. Danny and I also had a productive prototyping sprint on a strange narrative documentary soccer game(?) And finally, I spent this summer deep in researching and writing a long essay about future imaginaries and The Tower of Babel for a new outlet of the UCLA Game Lab in development.
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This is project start for Dungeon Mode Kit, a set of tools for prototyping games within the Dungeon Mode.