Aaron Oldenburg
Aaron Oldenburg is a Baltimore-based game, interactive and video artist. His work has exhibited in festivals and galleries in New York, Johannesburg, London, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Los Angeles, including SIGGRAPH, A MAZE. International Games and Playful Media Festival, the LeftField Collection at EGX Rezzed, Slamdance DIG, Game On! - El arte en el juego, and FILE Electronic Language International Festival. His games have been written about in Kill Screen, Baltimore City Paper, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
He teaches game design as an Associate Professor in University of Baltimore's Simulation and Game Design program and has an MFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His writing on games has been published in Game Studies, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and the proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In October 2003 he finished two years as an HIV Health Extension Agent for the Peace Corps in Mali.
Address: Baltimore, Maryland, United States
He teaches game design as an Associate Professor in University of Baltimore's Simulation and Game Design program and has an MFA from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His writing on games has been published in Game Studies, Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds, and the proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA). In October 2003 he finished two years as an HIV Health Extension Agent for the Peace Corps in Mali.
Address: Baltimore, Maryland, United States
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Papers by Aaron Oldenburg
My process involved creating a three-dimensional environment in Flash that the player could explore non-linearly. Within the environment are characters with whom to converse, and conversation is based on a fluid navigation system similar to the environment's exterior exploration. Stories are based on my diary entries and letters home and were chosen for their personal, surprising, and multilayered nature. Rather than use traditional game design methods I chose to start with narrative and imagery first and create the game structure from them.
During play the user discovers narratives that build on one another throughout the course of the experience. The player uses these to form a meaningful picture of the environment as a whole. The order selected to experience the narrative changes its interpretation, as reading an event over another influences the understanding of subsequent events. The surprising and non sequitur nature of the narrative makes the non-player characters as well as the environment itself seem more plausible.
Conference Presentations by Aaron Oldenburg
My process involved creating a three-dimensional environment in Flash that the player could explore non-linearly. Within the environment are characters with whom to converse, and conversation is based on a fluid navigation system similar to the environment's exterior exploration. Stories are based on my diary entries and letters home and were chosen for their personal, surprising, and multilayered nature. Rather than use traditional game design methods I chose to start with narrative and imagery first and create the game structure from them.
During play the user discovers narratives that build on one another throughout the course of the experience. The player uses these to form a meaningful picture of the environment as a whole. The order selected to experience the narrative changes its interpretation, as reading an event over another influences the understanding of subsequent events. The surprising and non sequitur nature of the narrative makes the non-player characters as well as the environment itself seem more plausible.