Friday, January 1, 2010

Student's game challenges players' imaginations as writers


Student's game challenges players' imaginations as writers:

"Stories are all around us, all the time. So why aren't more people writing them?

Tait McKenzie Johnson, a writing major at the University of Pittsburgh, thinks they may be scared of the idea, unsure of where to begin or how to move on from there.

He reasoned that if more folks saw writing as fun instead of difficult or intimidating, they might be interested in doing it. So, for the final project in his Narrative and Technology class, he invented a game to kick-start the players' imaginations.

It's called Unlimited Story Deck, and it consists of 336 cards under five categories: characters (i.e., alien, dictator, hacker); events (apocalypse, flying, playing music); settings (museum, prison, volcano); objects (vehicle, perfume, heirloom); and dynamics (artistic, forbidden, prehistoric).

Players, working alone or with others, draw cards and construct a sto"