Michael Annetta

Updated my past projects page!

mannetta — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 21:30:22 +0000

Just a quick post to say that I’ve made some quick updates to my past projects page. I intend to update it even more and hopefully embed playable links right in the page as well.

Elephant in Game Show!

mannetta — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 20:00:45 +0000

I am thrilled to post that my game, Elephant in the Relationship, has been selected to be shown at Game Show NYC, a games, education and art conference.

Initially conceived as a serious game in Tracy Fullerton’s Game Design Workshop class, the Elephant in the Relationship team (Andy Uehara, Casey China, Joshua McVeigh-Schultz and myself) has worked to sculpt the game over several iterations and various playtests.

Elephant in the Relationship is a game for 2 to 4 players in which players try to communicate deeply troubling relationship issues. Players take on the roles of two people in a personal relationship and turn the drama of a potentially risky (or intimate) interaction into spectacle for a group to enjoy. The game fuses Pictionary-style drawing and guessing mechanics with elements of doll-play and improvisational theater, asking players to place themselves into a difficult emotional scenario with their partner.

Resolutions

mannetta — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 15:45:28 +0000

So it’s already 2011 and I’ve realized that I have been horribly, horribly remiss in updating my blog. I despise New Year’s resolutions, but I’m making a promise to myself to try to update my blog at least once a week this year. Surely I have enough going on in my life to write about something interesting.

New Post on the USC Blog

mannetta — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:45:09 +0000

Since I’m still working out just how to show the same post on both of my blogs, here is a link to my latest blog post on the USC IMD Site. This post is part of the first assignment in our World Building class, dissecting and discussing a narrative world with which we are very familiar. Those familiar with me should not be surprised that I chose to discuss my beloved Legion of Superheroes. I hope to have this cross-posting business worked out pretty soon.

Grad School – Year Two, Day One

mannetta — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:00:46 +0000

Today officially begins the second year of graduate school for me as I pursue my MFA in Interactive Media. This semester promises to be fun and interesting as most of my classes are along the fun, creative, artistic side. The department has also launched a new blog system as well (and on the WordPress platform too!) so I will most likely be cross-posting between the blog that I must keep there and my blog here. ) First Assignment: assessing and analyzing an existing storytelling/narrative world for my World Building class. It will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I’ll be analyzing the universe of the Legion of Superheroes. Update post coming soon!

Where is the love . . . continued . . .

mannetta — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:48:08 +0000

I was a little excited when I sent in my angry letter about Comic-Con to Entertainment Weekly on the 2nd because I received an email back from an editor saying that they were considering printing my letter in the “Feedback” section of their 1116/1117 issue and needed to verify the spelling of my name and address. I was less excited when I received their current issue in the mail yesterday to discover that they didn’t print ANY “Feedback” in this double-sized issue. Because when you have the room for twice your usual content, the first thing you jettison are the thoughts and opinions of your readers and subscribers.

Elephant is rejected by Meaningful Play

mannetta — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:50:41 +0000

We received an email today from the co-chairs of Meaningful Play today that they have rejected our entry, Elephant in the Relationship, into the games competition. Clearly there was some misunderstanding of the rule set presented in the game (one reviewer thought, erroneously, that you needed to play the game with your actual partner). We are currently reviewing and rewriting our rule set to address such simple misunderstandings. There was also an assertion that the Meaningful Play conference was primarily for digital games (an assertion that further distresses me as one of the keynote speakers at this year’s conference is Helle Winding, currently the senior director within marketing and product management for Lego^® Universe, a new MMORPG.) Yes, even Legos are focusing more and more on the digital realm. This idea that meaningful play is a “digital only” realm is a little short-sighted, in my opinion, and one that should be reconsidered by the conference’s organizers.

Where is the love . . .

mannetta — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:26:35 +0000

I asked in my angry email to Entertainment Weekly (as noted in my Twitter feed this morning). We’ll see if they actually print it. The entirety of my “letter” is as follows:

Regarding your coverage of this year’s Comic-Con, until the organizers finally get around to changing the name to the much-more-appropriate “PopCon” or “MarketingCon”, could you at least expand your San Diego Comic-Con coverage to add some information on, you know, actual comics? Yes, you covered Green Lantern, Thor, and Smallville, but where was any coverage on the actual comics on which those were based? Despite being perplexed why shows like Community and Sons of Anarchy are even showcased at a genre-based convention, Comic-Con is still popular for those of us who eschew Hall H and Ballroom 20 because some of the most fascinating things go on in panels on the other side of the building (e.g., Berkeley Breathed discussing sources of inspiration or Grant Morrison talking about the kinkier parts of Batman’s 75 year history). Your title is Entertainment Weekly but you seem to forget that some of us are still quite entertained, weekly, by the wonderful characters and worlds that come out of a century-old medium composed of sequential art panels telling good stories (or as professor Henry Jenkins put it in one woefully under-attended panel “comics are the R&D branch of the entertainment industry.”)

(additional links are all mine, because if you’re not going to hyper-annotate your blog, why bother?)

There’s a New URL in town . . .

mannetta — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:08:18 +0000

and she’s loo-king GOOD! Okay, actually I’ve had michaelannetta.com registered for years, it’s just that I finally got around to having it point here, to my new home on the web. Not that I couldn’t update my old site, but I figured that having a blog would be easier to update and probably allow me to update on a more regular basis (so says the man whose last blog post was more than two weeks ago.)

Elephant is submitted to Meaningful Play

mannetta — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 19:00:42 +0000

Last fall, during my first semester of grad school, one of my required classes was Tracy Fullerton’s wonderful game design class. One of our projects was to create a serious game. Working with the amazing team of Andy Uehara and Josuha McVeigh-Schultz, we came up with a party game called “Elephant in the Relationship”. EitR (or “Elephant” for short) is a role-playing game where teammates play partners in a relationship (any relationship) who have an unspeakable issue that needs to be addressed. One team mate is given a very limited vocabulary which he or she uses to try to communicate that issue to the other team mate. We had such fun developing the game for class that we decided we wanted to expand on the game and take it to the next level. This summer, aided by the wonderful Casey China, we embarked on the second phase of development of EitR and it’s been great.

Although we’re still in development, we submitted a working prototype of the game to the Meaningful Play Conference’s games competition this week (which was tough because it coincided with my being out of town for Comic-Con). We won’t know the results of our submission until September, but I will absolutely be keeping this blog updated with our progress. I will also be expanding my Projects page to include some more information about Elephant.