ProphecyBoy

Learning about prostitutes in Brooklyn in the 70's. Like you do. - more on Twitter
November 18th 2007
Tags: Big Games

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Will You Be My Companion Cube?

Spoiler Alert! This post contains some narrative spoilers for Portal. Play it and come back. I'll wait. Spoiler Alert v.2! This post contains some spoilers for the 2-player ARG I'm working on. If you're playing, or think you might play, don't read it! Since I don't think I've properly explained this, I ...
November 13th 2007
Tags: Big Games

2 Comments

Games for Rich People

I'm working on an alternate reality game that has 9 people designing an experience for 2 players. But that's not precisely what I'm thinking about at the moment. Tonight we were talking about how such a game, with it's intimately designed experiences, has a good chance of being life altering, ...
October 19th 2007
Tags: Big Games, Mapping, Redial: Interactive Telephony

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The Invention of Murder play testing this weekend

Jeff designed this awesome cover for our Invention of Murder game books. Adam, Jeff, Ruth, and I are play testing our big game this weekend, and we'd love for you to join us. The Invention of Murder is a mystery game based on the real unsolved murder of Mary Rogers in ...
October 15th 2007
Tags: Big Games, Redial: Interactive Telephony

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The Invention of Murder – location plotting and IA

For Big Games, Adam Parrish, Ruth, Jeff, and I are creating a mystery game played in the streets of lower Manhattan (see above!), based on the unsolved murder of Mary Rogers, made famous in Edgar Allen Poe's story The Mystery of Marie Roget. We borrowed some gameplay mechanics from the ...
October 8th 2007
Tags: Big Games, Mapping, Performing Technology

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Mapping across disciplines

In thinking about how mapping relates to the rest of my ITP work, the first thing that springs to mind is certainly situationism and the ideas of Guy Debord, who has come up multiple times in different contexts. For Big Games I reported on SFZero, a real world game steeped ...
September 25th 2007
Tags: Big Games

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Fictive Until Proven Otherwise: SFZero and the Boundless Magic Circle

Download PDF SFZero has many features which set it apart from other ARGs and large scale real-world games: player-generated tasks, a decidedly situationist bent, and a focus on collaborative production over hunting for clues. But the most interesting and subversive aspect of the game is the way it provides a framework ...

Colophon

Turning coffee into feats of intellectual derring-do since 2001

Hi there, I'm Adam Simon. I'm the Creative Director and Co-Founder of Socialbomb, a social gaming startup in New York City. I recently graduated from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), doing research in large scale game design, social networking, urban computing, performative technology, and networked objects. You can find info on my thesis here, and a big list of all my ITP-related posts here

I sometimes work at area/code.

Projects that I've been a part of which you might have heard of include BootyDialer, The Invention of Murder, Rumplestiltskin (An Aretefactual Performance), & Sharkrunners

You can email me at adam @ [the name of this website].

Syndicate

March 12th 2009
Tags: ITP, Social Software Studio, Thesis, Uncategorized No Comments

Social Heroes: Games as APIs for Social Interaction (aka, my ITP thesis)

Because I've been busy/lazy and off the blogging habit, here, at long last, is my thesis for ITP, almost a year late. Comments and such are still more than welcome, as many of the ideas are still being worked on in my current projects, and Social Heroes itself is likely ...
April 14th 2008
Tags: Social Facts, Social Software Studio No Comments

Crazy Blind Date: A Quintet for Human & Computer

The appeal of Crazy Blind Date\ is immediately apparent, and seems custom-designed for busy city folks: “on very short notice we can set you up on quick dates with total strangers at public places like bars and coffee shops. You're not allowed to see their picture or even communicate.” Created ...
March 29th 2008
Tags: Social Software Studio, Thesis 2 Comments

Social Heroes

My thesis has split into two ideas, something which was foreshadowed at the end of my midterm presentation. I mistakenly assumed that one of the ideas would seem obviously better than the other, but that hasn't happened. Rather, I'm stuck with two ideas which I think explore the ideas I'm ...
March 16th 2008
Tags: ITP One Comment

PCBs from Eagle to Production

In this post I'm going to explain how to output files from Eagle PCB in order to send your designs off to be professionally fabbed. There are two major steps before this in the process: creating the electrical schematic, and moving from that schematic to a board layout. I'm not ...
March 14th 2008
Tags: Social Software Studio, Thesis One Comment

Thesis: midterm presentation & playtest

| View | Upload your own ITP Thesis: Midterm presentation (with notes) (PDF) Here's the midterm presentation I just gave in my thesis section (the PDF includes the presenter notes, and is perhaps more comprehensible). I felt like this presentation was a return to form for me - lots of photos, ...

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