This weekend, I had a chance to work on the first artifact for the Black Letter Game, a series by the makers of the Game that delivers, over the course of several months, five real-life, puzzle-containing objects to your door, each tied into a larger story and plotline.

I wasn’t sure if I should reveal anything about the artifact since mostly the internet has been keeping mum about it and its contents, but I did just find that it’s publicly available for viewing for those who are willing to search for it. Thus, I don’t feel bad in saying that the box first contained what appeared to be a simple transaction receipt.

Closer inspection revealed, of course, that it contained five lovely, challenging puzzles, three of which were solved after about four or five hours working on it on Saturday morning (and much of the heavy lifting had been done before we arrived).

Of the two remaining, one is pending confirmation, and the other is still nearly impenetrable. The game documentation states that each puzzle has a month-long window to solve it, and I don’t think it’s going to take that long, but the not-knowing is actually pretty fun.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a chance to do any serious puzzling, much less anything in a group, and as I’ve been in need of some mental stretching lately, it’s come at a really good time. I have that same old sense of excitement and need-to-know-right-now tightness in the pit of my stomach, and I’m glad to welcome it back.

Every summer as a kid, my dad took me and my younger sister to a couple of new US states for a short vacation. After ten years of doing that, plus some school and personal trips, I’d covered 48 states.

Now that Jey’s here, I want him to see all of the amazing vistas and interesting spots around this massive country, so we’ve started doing a fair bit of traveling ourselves. But we ran into a couple of problems: first, what’s the best way to keep the memories of those trips alive in our home, so that we can enjoy them, and share them with others? Second, how can we display our digital photos, and further, still tell a story about where we’ve been and what we’ve seen?

We eventually landed on a solution…

Creating a giant canvas map to be displayed in our home to be a constantly-evolving piece of artwork ties our first problem together neatly: as we travel to new places, we’ll paint on the names of the cities we visit along with landmarks, city emblems, whatever strikes our fancy and triggers memories of the trip.

Unfortunately, nobody manufactures canvases in the size we really wanted, so we bought canvas stretchers and custom-cut braces, along with a massive roll of canvas.

Once that was assembled, we made a gridded map of the country, then taped off the canvas to make sure the lines were accurate.

We wanted the look of the finished piece to be personal and informal, so once the lines were on, we drew in all the state shapes by hand. This is a lot harder than you might imagine, particularly on states that hit the northern and eastern borders of the country.

(Here, you can see that we started drawing in all the states with the tape still on. That got pretty complicated, so it didn’t last long, and we eventually got all the grids down, removed the tape, and finished up the rest of the states.)

The entire thing is drawn now, and the grid lines are erased. The next step will be painting it, and then adding all of the city art for places we’ve been, like San Francisco, Boulder, Colorado, Dallas, Austin, New York…

Then, we have to deal with the second part of the problem: how can we connect all of our trip photos from those places to this large, physical record? We’ve had an idea that shouldn’t be too hard to execute. But for now, stay tuned.

In the mood for some Halloween films? Me too! I love Halloween as much as I love using Netflix Instant and making lists, so I’ve compiled my favorite movies available for streaming, as of 2011. It’s a big list, with everything from goofy comedy gore to truly disturbing horror, and everything in between; check it out below.

This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive; it’s made up of films I actually liked, and would recommend to others.

Everything on this list should be available until at least November 1, but please let me know in the comments if something has gone away.

Last update: October 10, 2011.

• Trick ‘r’ Treat
  A little-known gem. Three intertwining stories in a small town prove to be surprisingly, deeply creepy.

• Session 9
  Psychological/suspenseful horror film in which a haunted asylum drives a team of cleaners mad.

• Little Shop of Horrors
  Not strictly Halloween-y, but a great, campy, creepy musical nonetheless.

• Cannibal! The Musical
  South Park writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone star in…a musical about cannibalism.

• Scream, Blacula, Scream!
  Blaxploitation voodoo Dracula, with Pam Grier.

• The Fog
  Zombie-ghost pirates terrorize a small town in this John Carpenter film. More John Carpenter horror: Prince of Darkness, Village of the Damned, In the Mouth of Madness and Masters of Horror: John Carpenter: Cigarette Burns.

• Dracula (1931)
  The classic, starring Bela Lugosi.

• Ichi the Killer
  The pinnacle of Japanese ‘horror porn’ or ‘gorno’. Brutal.

• Leprechaun 5: In the Hood
  Can you believe shows like Firefly get canceled, while film series like Leprechaun get five iterations? Me neither. If you like the goofy horror creatures, there’s also Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Rumplestiltskin.

• An American Werewolf in London
  This werewolf tale is so evocative, moody and funny, that it doesn’t really matter if the plot wanders a bit. Just sit back and enjoy the transformation scene.

• Cronos
  A take on vampirism by Mexican genius director Guillermo del Toro, Cronos is great at any time of the year.

• From Dusk Til Dawn
  George Clooney, Juliette Lewis, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez…and vampires.

• The Lost Boys
  1980s does vampires – Kiefer Sutherland and the Coreys. Pretty creepy!

• Practical Magic
  A gentler type of witchery, this is about two supernatural sisters (Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman) in Massachusetts who live in a beautiful old house and wear beautiful old clothes and do sometimes not-so-beautiful magic.

• Dark Shadows
  Four seasons of the classic daily soap opera from the 60s, which eventually totaled 1,225 episodes. Full of mood and mystery, the show doesn’t introduce the supernatural stuff until about halfway through the first season.

• The Craft
  Teen witches terrorize a high school and each other.

• The Evil Dead
  Sam Raimi’s 1983 classic cult horror film stars Bruce Campell, a cabin and a bunch of zombies. Black humor, goofy gore.

• South Park Spook-Tacular!
  All the Halloween eps of South Park in one title.

• Aaahh!! Real Monsters
  One of the greatest Nickelodeon cartoons, this show is about a group of monster students. Funny, weird, creepy and gross (in a good way).

• Rocko’s Modern Life, Season 3 Episode 1
  Another Nickelodeon great, about a wallabee and his surreal life. Just this one episode is themed after Halloween.

• Fat Albert’s Halloween Special
  Hey hey hey, if your kids want to watch some Halloween cartoons, this is a good place to start. For kids, there’s also Barney: Halloween Party, Eloise’s Rawther Unusual Halloween, Thomas & Friends: Halloween Adventures and Children’s Favorites: Halloween Treats.

• Child’s Play
  Definitely NOT for kids, this tale about a murderous doll is way creepy.

• Creepshow
  George Romero and Steven King team up for a horror anthology.

• Elvira, Mistress of the Dark
  Campy character Elvira causes chaos in her newly adopted hometown.

• Scream
  The classic Wes Craven sendup of old-school horror films stands on its own.

• Shutter Island
  Suspenseful thriller about a marshal investigating a missing woman on an island asylum.

• Three … Extremes
  Three of the greatest Asian horror directors make scary shorts – uncompromising and not for the faint of heart.

• Night of the Living Dead
  The original zombie film from the master, George Romero. Still as creepy as ever, and a must-see.

• Day of the Dead (2008)
  A remake of the third “of the Dead” films, set after the zombies have overrun the planet…only in this version, they sprint after you instead of slowly, inevitably shuffling.

• Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  1920s version of the Robert Louis Stevenson tale of twisted morality and terrifying humanity (or lack thereof).

• Nosferatu
  The classic Murnau silent film telling of the story of Count Orlock, a vampire who arrives in England to feast upon human blood.

• Paranormal Activity
  This low-budget mockumentary style film is the closest thing we’ve had to the Blair Witch Project in a long time. Best watched in a group with all the lights turned down.

• Thirst
  Korean horror director Chan-wook Park’s take on vampires, with all the comedy, drama and violence that typify his work.

• Dead Snow
  Nazi zombies.

• Let the Right One In (or the remake, Let Me In)
  A fantastically fresh take on the blood-sucking undead set in a small Swedish village.

• The Fly
  Vincent Price’s brother gets splinched with a common housefly. Classic!

• The Exorcist
  The ultimate horror movie, which set the bar for everything else that’s come since, and is rarely matched.

Want the Halloween mood without the scares? Try one of these documentaries:

• Starz Inside: Bloodsucking Cinema
• Starz Inside: Fantastic Flesh: The Art of Make-Up EFX
• Nightmares in Red, White and Blue
• Tales from the Script
• 1,000 Ways to Die
• American Scary

Suggestions, corrections, additions? Let me know in the comments.

Every Gmail user is familiar with this menu, which allows you to load images in an email message only when you wish to see them:

Normally, the email message is just a series of blank white squares. But in July of this year, Pizza Express made people want to click that “Display images below” option.

Awesome!

Using a bit of code, they approximated the image file in colors and simple form. The end result delights the recipient, and as a result people willingly click to reveal the advertisement within. Everyone wins!

Well done to the person who noticed that bit of unused, unimportant and ignored blank space, and decided to fill it with a little color. While this is an extremely simple example, if you consider its purpose to be simply bringing joy to the viewer, it represents a larger principle that artists and designers of all stripes can benefit from keeping in mind.

Found the coolest iPad app: The Civil War Today. It’s a daily newspaper with push notifications and all the fun gadgetry associated with news delivery apps, only each day’s content is from one hundred and fifty years ago, to the day.

The premise is simple: you get to relive the Civil War as it unfolded. Every day, you fire up the application and are presented with a handful of news stories that actually appeared in newspapers exactly 150 years ago — along with photographs, maps, quotes, and a running tally of the casualty count so far. The application will be updated every day for the next four years.

I love studying material that helps lend context to a historical period, even more so if it’s about the daily lives of the people of the time. I can never quite forget that we’re all just brief participants in the long game of humanity, with life spans just short enough to make the same mistakes as previous generations and learn from them ever so slightly too late.

This app serves as a nice reminder not to get too caught up in the gossip and hysteria of 24-hour news cycles, or even just the day to day grind of information flow; no matter what events are unfolding, the truism remains: the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Incidentally the scope of this app also neatly overlaps with my love of epistolary novels retold in digital form, like the real-time blog posting of Dracula.

Some other similar non-fiction projects:

• @Genny_Spencer – the more or less daily diary of the poster’s great aunt, from 1937 to 1941.
• @GGPratt – the diary of a 99 year old woman, written in 1974.
• Orwell Diaries 1938-1942 – “George Orwell’s domestic and political diary entries, posted 70 years to the day after they were written”.
• @TweetsofOld – tidbits of newspapers from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Not to the day, but still very interesting.

This is what the hypertext project looks like so far, but it should easily have four to five times that number of segments to be considered bare-bones-complete. The only work I’m able to do on it currently is to think very hard about what exactly I’d like to say through each character, but that’s sufficient til things calm down a little.

I have learned, however, that if I want to limit each project to a single month I’ll need to either set a much smaller end goal and/or try to get them done in sprints. I’d been considering using an Inform interactive fiction project I’d already started for the month of July, but maybe instead a digital comic, created in a single day a la 24 Hour Comics Day?

As part of this new hustle, all of my recreational game playing has also come to a complete standstill, because I have to hold on very tight to what little free time I have. I’ve been “playing” Tiny Tower, which isn’t a game as much as a tower/business management sim with cute graphics.

The game itself is built on the model that Nimblebit discovered is the most effective, which is to release a free game and offer in-app purchases; people who wouldn’t be willing to shell out that initial .99 are more than happy to pay $20 to speed things along using “Tower Bux”. It’s possible to play without buying bux, but things move more slowly the higher the tower climbs (restocking, new residents moving in, etc). And it’s perpetual, with businesses constantly selling and needing restocking and selling again.

Perhaps it’s a combination of my own gamer classification and my extreme wariness of the Zynga performance-reward dynamic, but I can’t decide how I feel about it. There’s no specific goal in Tiny Tower other than “build the biggest tower ever” and nothing to really do except tap floors to restock things or build new businesses.

What I’m wondering is, is it worth investing my time in a diversion with no tangible reward? (Not to suggest it isn’t fun – as a kid, I hated spending quarters on arcade games that didn’t shell out a prize, like a bouncy ball or piece of gum and I guess I’m still kind of the same way. Weirdo!) Tiny Tower works well enough right now, when I don’t have time to invest in games that require more active participation. But I know that when I do figure out that balance in my life and reclaim some of my free time, 1) I will eventually abandon my tower, and 2) I don’t really mind that outcome.

Still, I’m accepting that it’s okay to just be idle sometimes, so I’m not too fussed. But my next problem is, when do I stop playing this thing? Do I wait until I’ve hit 30 floors, or 50? Is it fair to ply me emotionally with the lives of the tower residents (who post their funny thoughts to their own “Bitbook” feed), if I’m just going to resign them to the darkness when all the businesses run out of stock for the final time?

Kind of like my work situation, in which I have multiple options but don’t know what direction I’m going to be taking in a few months, with Tiny Tower I’m learning to function in a kind of enforced here and now, with no known reward to look forward to, and only the checking-over of my work at the end of each day to mark my progress. Not a bad thing, but different.

I wrote hypertext fiction for a creative writing class in high school, but my first formal exposure to this type of literature was during a college class on Latin American literature, when a teacher described “Hopscotch” by Juilo Cortazar. It’s a stream-of-consciousness novel with 99 chapters of “expendable” content, which can be read with an alternate table of contents provided by the author to supplement the main story. The final two chapters loop together, allowing the reader to choose which ending to the story they prefer.

This type of fiction inhabits an interesting narrative space, one in which the reader is both creating the work of fiction for themselves, but also participating as one single element in a work that’s larger than and which incorporates them. The author is both completely in control of the world, and also relinquishes control of the reader’s experience.

It’s easiest to think of this duality in the context of a video game; a game maker creates the world, sets up the story and characters and so on, and can either force the player down a particular path of play, or leave the world open to exploring and molding to their own preferred method of gameplay. But this can also apply to books (or at least written, printed works of fiction that may be loosely defined as books), and that’s what I’m specifically interested in today.

My reading list is as follows:

(The Unfortunates, via)

• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski – a novel with multiple layered stories told in footnotes by an unrelated, unreliable narrator on an academic study of a nonexistent documentary film about a transdimensional house. The layout, colors and presence of the type itself is also related to the narrative experience.
• Hopscotch (Rayuela) by Julio Cortazar – described above, this book can be read in order as presented or in a pattern provided by the author, with the reader choosing their own ending.
• Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words – presented as an alphabetically-arranged dictionary, this book is the fictional historical record of an Indo-European tribe who vanished in the 10th century. It can be browsed and read in any order, there are lots of cross-references between sections, and there are two versions, “male” and “female”, with minute differences.
• The Mixquiahuala Letters by Ana Castillo – an homage to Hopscotch, this book has three ways to read the letters in this episolary novel about two female artists: “one for the conformist, one for the cynic, and one for the quixotic.”
• 253 by Geoff Ryman – a hypernext novel presented online, describing the seven carriages on a Bakerloo Line train, each with 36 seats filled with passengers, as it travels from Embankment to Elephant and Castle. I’ll be starting with the driver.
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino – two groups of travelers have lost their voices and must tell their stories using tarot cards; “A narrator at each place interprets the cards for the reader, but since the tarot cards are subject to multiple interpretations, the stories the narrators offer are not necessarily the stories intended by the mute storytellers.”
• Heart Suit (McSweeney’s Issue 16) by Robert Coover – a story told on thirteen interchangeable playing cards (shown below)

• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec – this book uses a 10×10 grid (and is meant to be similar to a chess board) to dissect and reassemble the inhabitants and contents of a Parisian apartment building, playing with collage-style art, word games and acrostics to create a “completed jigsaw puzzle”
• The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson – published in 1969, this is a box that contains a collection of loose and gathered books of printed pages, making 27 chapters total; the first and last chapters are marked as such, and the order of the others is left to the reader. As one Amazon review says, “It’s a story told as chapters that appear as flashbacks, or real events depending on where they fall in your random sequence.” (shown at the top of this post)
• McSweeney’s Issue 22 – this issue is “a three-part exercise in inspired restriction — of author, of content, and of form.” My specific interest is in the Oulipo writing in the third section. Oulipo is a French movement from the 60s which “seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques”; the repertoire includes both The Castle of Crossed Destinies and Life: A User’s Manual, listed above. It’s also responsible for “A Void”, Perec’s novel written entirely without the letter “e”.
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne – written in the 18th century and described today as “the first hypertext novel” due to its meandering plotlines, branching stories and stylistic flourishes. It’s also supposed to be very funny to boot.
• Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges – a dense collection of puzzle box stories, essays, book reviews for books that haven’t been written, obituaries for people that never lived. Frequently described as “dense”, “intensely cerebral” and “influential”, which I generally take to mean it’s often assigned in literature classes to give context to later, easier works.
• Webcomics by Scott McCloud – McCloud has long been at the forefront of explaining the how and why of comic making and reading, and he’s also done a lot of playing around with comic form using the internet, making the argument that online, comics aren’t limited to the prescribed dimensions of the printed paper pages; works include an infinite canvas comic and a “zooming” comic (clicked to reveal the next panel from within the current one).
• Meanwhile: Pick Any Path. 3,856 Story Possibilities. by Jason Shiga – like choose-your-own-adventure/chutes and ladders (or snakes and ladders, if you’re in the UK) in graphic novel form.
• Interactive Audio Novel on Spotify by Hurts and Joe Stretch – a choose-your-own adventure that takes advantage of the Spotify file system

And some cut-up/fold-in/assemblage/collage art books:

• The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs – Oulipo/Dadaist book examining language of a virus and social revolution through technology
• Diary of An Amateur Photographer by Graham Rawle – collage-style mystery with a very unreliable narrator
• Woman’s World: A Novel by Graham Rawle – a pulp noir constructed from 40,000 text fragments cut from 1960s women’s magazines

And of course, the more I research the more books I find to add to the list. This is the core, though, and it’s inspired me to try and create one work of hypertext/interactive/experimental fiction each month or so, so I’m sticking to it for now.

When I watch a film like Seven Samurai, I like to pause and look at interesting scenes, or sometimes I rewind to re-watch certain moments, savoring their goodness. In a game like Deus Ex I will replay the whole game because I want to try a new angle on the narrative, on the role that I’ve created in my head. I don’t create roles for myself when watching a movie or reading a book, but I do when I’m playing a game.

Do you see what’s happening here? This article (like the ones before it, like many more to come) is yet another manifestation of a collective desire that many gamers share. It’s a desire to express something about video games. They’re not quite sure how to say it. Words like “art” and “serious” and “intelligent” get tossed around a lot, but end up holding little traction. Similarly, comparisons to other media like film and literature are made, but they don’t stick.

What they’re really trying to express is this:

For many gamers, gaming as a form of entertainment is more engaging, more challenging and more satisfying than most television, movies or books. They hardly watch TV or movies anymore, because they like playing games so much more.

They want this to mean that games are “art” or that the gaming industry has figured out what Hollywood hasn’t, or that the entertainment value on a game is more efficient than a book or a film.

What they (usually) fail to realize is that a game can’t possibly compare to a book or a film, and that the value of a game is not wholly in the finished product, but in fact the value of a game is only manifest in the playing of it.

It is participatory media, more akin to street theater than the silver screen. There’s a communal aspect, especially nowadays. All games are simulations of something: a set of boundaries and an opportunity to test those boundaries. Each player inhabits and defines these game worlds in significantly different ways, and that becomes an important part of the experience.

For a movie or a book, the world is basically complete. There are no boundaries to test because that’s not how these things work (unless you end up writing fanfic). In a film or a book you observe. In a game you also observe, but then you act, within the media itself. This is pretty unique to games, and perhaps some of the more ambitious performance art/gallery space.

In short: apples and oranges. It just turns out that there’s a larger group of people who have really come to prefer oranges and believe that oranges are now the future. This comparison does nothing to elevate oranges or to reduce the importance of apples in the future.

-jnrussell, via Metafilter