Acetio | Blogma

(latest revision: 2010/12/20)

This was entered into the 9th Casual Gameplay Design Competition where it lost the 3rd-place slot by something like 1/100 of a point.

The engine is the ChoiceScript engine, which is essentially a set of JavaScript libraries and is intended for the creation of interactive naratives, somewaht similar to the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories from the 1980s.

There are no graphics, but there is no typing either, as there was in Zork and those other classic Infocom games. Instead, every few paragraphs the reader is presented with a multiple choice about how the plot should unfold. It's a fascinating and unique genre.

The prior examples of ChoiceScript games I had seen were quite dramatic, so I wanted to do something more whimsical. With the 1980s on the brain I decided that "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" would be an appropriate starting point and I tried to channel the spirit of Douglas Adams as I wrote the game.

I'm in discussion with the guys who wrote ChoiceScript about porting the game to a mobile app, but that is still in the works.

Some great examples of retro-futurist "envisionings"

The site: http://ru-2061.livejournal.com/ is devoted to a drawing contest where artists imagine a planet Mars colonized by a thriving Soviet space program in the year 2061.

Not all of the work is good, but some is very good. The second round of the contest, "The Stone Belt" seems to have attracted more talent than the first.

The page is in Russian, but Chrome translates it pretty well.

Russian art is always fascinating to me because the default color palette is just a little different from the American one. It's hard to put my finger on it, but if you look at, say images taken by Russian satellites:

the blues are shifted a bit toward green and the reds shifted a bit toward orange, in comparisons to the NASA photos which are usually "color-corrected" so that the blues, reds, and greens are fully saturated.

This is one of those things that sounds more like a discarded Dharma Initiative plot line from Lost than reality, yet it's real. The Burlington (VT) Free Press recently profiled the Teresem Movement Foundation, based in Bristol, VT, which calls itself a "a transreligion for technological times".

They are working on promoting "exponential life" - essentially getting to the point where we can download our consciousnesses into robotic bodies. The idea has been explored recently in shows such as Dollhouse and Caprica and does seem to be the ultimate target of a lot of scientific research.

Teresem has two journals: The Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology and The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness.

The NYTimes profiled one of the automatons, Bina48, which, along with tripping the "uncanny valley" alarm, is a good demonstration of how AI hasn't changed much since the days of the Alice chatbot

Heady stuff. Cool and unnerving.

The 5th Planet

Pt 1.

Jackson felt the warm squeeze on his wrist that meant a call was
coming in. It was from Jarvis, the managing dispatcher for Asmico Inc.

"Hi Jarvis, what's shaking?"

"Everything, man. Where are you?"

Jackson adjusted the cruise module in his rig. "Just drifting to the Moon."

"Ugh. Why are you wasting time with that bullshit? That doesn't pay nothing."