Digital literature, in which a fictional tale unfolds while a player witnesses but minimally intervenes in its progress, is an obvious example. Two games which invoke early modern England, Elsinore (Golden Flitch, 2019) and Astrologaster (Nyamyam, 2019), and which are both anchored upon the central motif of a book, are especially self-conscious examples of such bookish play – and ones which may challenge SHARP members and their students to see reading and its concurrent activities anew.
Tag: games
Ex Libris. Designed by Adam P. McIver with art by Jacqui Davis, Adam P. McIver, and Anita Osburn.
The story of Ex Libris is that the Mayor needs to assign a new Grand Librarian, and he’s invited all the town’s book collectors to be considered for the role. So you’re all preparing for the Mayor’s Official Inspector to come and judge your collection — the collector with the best collection (that is, with the most points at the end of the game) wins the job, and the game. In order to build their collections (and gain points) the players collect books following prompts set at the start of the game, and carefully shelve the books they collect over the course of the game.
Pentiment: An Interview with Josh Sawyer
Pentiment (Obsidian 2022, $19.99, Xbox and Steam), the new narrative game from Obsidian, is a piece of media that gets…
Gutenberg. Designed by Katarzyna Cioch and Wojciech Wiśniewski. Published by Granna and Portal Games, 2021.
A Gutenberg board game?! “So I guess the audience for this is basically the entire membership of SHARP,” someone tweeted when it came out late last year. Yes and no.