Alice and Kev

Alice and Raph both pointed to this awesome, gripping story of Alice and Kev, an experiment-slash-narrative by a game design student in the UK. She created a homeless father and daughter in The Sims 3, took away all their wealth, and then set about letting them live their lives.

Awesome on so many levels. The depth of story possible in Sims3, the depth of the engine to allow for emergent behaviors, the irrational traits & behaviors that show some of the game's design limitations...

Anyhow, go read it starting here.

Passionate storytelling

Another Must-watch ted talk. This one from author Isabelle Allende.

The content of her talk, about the oppression of women and the need for change around the world is compelling. I can't add anything else to the topic other than to urge you to watch it.

I do think that there are also lessons here for presenters to take away.

(1) Passion. She discusses it in her talk, and she clearly has it. This is a great example of how someone that has passion for their topic can engage an audience and infect them with kind of passion.

(2) Story-telling. She effectively uses story-telling to not just make a point, but to make it come up and hit you like a hammer.

(3) Use of humor. Wow. She can go from making the audience laugh, to making them gasp at stories of child rape, to making them laugh again, in the space of a few moments. She weilds humor like a katana. In less skilled hands, someone could kill themselves trying to do this, but in her skilled hands, it make the dreadfull 'lows' in her stories that much deeper. Like a roller coaster's high peaks making the deep valleys that much more terrifying.

(4) No slides. Just goes to show you; Imagery can help, but it is almost entirely about the speaker.