Uploaded October 2020 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
This talk is from the 2020 virtual Roguelike Celebration:
roguelike.club/event2020.html
Aaron is a writer and game designer focused on helping gamemakers and players tell stories together. He is a multi-time IndieCade and IGF finalist, and has spoken about digital storytelling at venues as diverse as Google, PAX, GaymerX, and WorldCon. He is the author of "Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider" and an upcoming book on the history of text games.
Aaron's recent project "Subcutanean" is a queer horror novel written with procedural text: each time someone orders a copy, it regenerates itself to present a slightly different permutation of its story. Over the last ten years he's created a series of novel-length games that explore what it means to write strongly authored content informed by procedural systems and algorithmic aesthetics. In this talk he focuses on three of these pieces and how the lessons I've learned from making them might be useful to other folks working with procedural text: Subcutanean, 18 Cadence (a 2013 Kirkus "Best Book App"), and Blue Lacuna (voted in 2015 one of the top 10 interactive fiction games of all time).
Find him on Twitter: twitter.com/aaronareed
Get your own copy of Subcutanean: subcutanean.textories.com
18 Cadence: 18cadence.textories.com
Blue Lacuna: blue-lacuna.textories.com
This talk is from the 2020 virtual Roguelike Celebration:
roguelike.club/event2020.html
Aaron is a writer and game designer focused on helping gamemakers and players tell stories together. He is a multi-time IndieCade and IGF finalist, and has spoken about digital storytelling at venues as diverse as Google, PAX, GaymerX, and WorldCon. He is the author of "Adventure Games: Playing the Outsider" and an upcoming book on the history of text games.
Aaron's recent project "Subcutanean" is a queer horror novel written with procedural text: each time someone orders a copy, it regenerates itself to present a slightly different permutation of its story. Over the last ten years he's created a series of novel-length games that explore what it means to write strongly authored content informed by procedural systems and algorithmic aesthetics. In this talk he focuses on three of these pieces and how the lessons I've learned from making them might be useful to other folks working with procedural text: Subcutanean, 18 Cadence (a 2013 Kirkus "Best Book App"), and Blue Lacuna (voted in 2015 one of the top 10 interactive fiction games of all time).
Find him on Twitter: twitter.com/aaronareed
Get your own copy of Subcutanean: subcutanean.textories.com
18 Cadence: 18cadence.textories.com
Blue Lacuna: blue-lacuna.textories.com
