Tag: Sean Stewart (Page 2 of 2)

Reminder: Last Call Poker PM Chat

poker_hand.jpgA reminder to all interested parties that the post-game Puppetmaster chat for Last Call Poker is happening tonight at 7:00 pm PST. As we announced last week, the chat will be happening in the #lastcall chat room on the Chat-Solutions network.

The members of 42 Entertainment that are scheduled to be in attendance are:

  • Elan Lee: Lead Design
  • Sean Stewart: Lead Writer
  • Maureen McHugh: Writer
  • Steve Peters: Design
  • Patricia Pizer: Design
  • Jane McGonigal: Live Events Lead
  • Jim Stewartson: Technical Lead

We will see you in #lastcall tonight — it’s going to be a full house of fun!

IGDA San Francisco Presents: I Love Bees, 4orty2wo

dvdbees.jpgOn April 26th, the International Game Developers Association will present “THINKING OUTSIDE THE (x)BOX (or “HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE BEES”) at 7:00 PM at the Metreon’s Action Theater in San Francisco (101 4th Street @ Mission).

Featured speakers will be Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart and Jim Stewartson of 4orty2wo Entertainment, the team behind the Alternate Reality Game “I Love Bees.”

4orty2wo’s Alternate Reality Game became a phenomenon last year, sending thousands of players running to payphones around the world. The innovative Halo 2 prequel involving a seemingly innocent website of a Napa Valley beekeeper and a shipwrecked AI from the future received a Game Developers Choice Award for Innovation, was featured at GDC’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and became the latest and most successful example of the nascent Alternate Reality Games (ARG) genre.

But what place do ARGs have in the world (and future) of video games? What is their relation to one another? Are there lessons to be learned from ARG production that can impact the way video games are made?

Join Jordan Weisman, Sean Stewart, and Jim Stewartson of 4orty2wo Entertainment as they examine I Love Bees to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of ARGs, their intersection with traditional video games, and the future of this exciting new form of digital play.

This event is free and open to the public. For more info: www.igda.org/sf

MSN’s New Search Engine Launches “Search Opera”

cy.jpgIn a move that, upon further reflection, makes perfect sense, MSN has launched a stealth “search opera” to help promote their new search engine. A search opera, according to Sean Stewart (author behind The Beast and I Love Bees), is just another term for an Alternate Reality Game. In this instance, having a search opera to accompany a search engine launch seems to be a pretty good fit! Sean has summed it up this way:

“Essentially, a search opera is a story treated as a scavenger hunt and a jigsaw puzzle rolled into one. What’s particularly nice about the search opera is that for a decade now people have been looking for a way to use the internet as an artistic medium. The net wants to be interactive, and it wants to be social. A search opera allows a collective audience to have an artistic experience while searching and gossiping and decoding and speculating: in short, while doing the things that the net was really born to do.”

The MSN Search Opera (ARG) centers around a guy named Cy and his conspiracy website. Following the links on Cy’s site and clues garnered by entering specific keywords into the MSN search engine yields videos (some of which are pretty funny), more characters, their journals, and a story that will develop over upcoming weeks.

And yes, I admit that I’ve already downloaded and assembled a hypnodragon of my very own, which my daughter thinks is gleefully amazing.

Discussion on unfiction.

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