It’s a good excuse to interview one of the founding sponsors of the AGI project, Jon Mak, a Toronto game designer who Newsweek dubbed a “wunderkind”. His abstract videogame Everyday Shooter came out for the PS3 and now it’s available on the PC — if you’d like a chance at winning a free copy, leave a comment in response to the MP3 interview I did with him below. In it Jon explains why Guitar Hero is fun despite being a sucky game, that he learns best through failing, how he made ES while working part-time for money thanks to context switch, & how the work gets better the more you take away.

No Flash? Get the MP3 here.

Sorry to all my dandy pals, but you fancified fuckers had it coming.

No Flash? Download the MP3 here.

This piece I’ve made is so derivative and so much weaker than anything they do that it kind of feels like This American Life fan fiction, but I’m fine with that. That’s just how good TAL is.

No Flash? Get the MP3 file here.

My American friends had talked about it for years, but I’ve only gotten hooked on This American Life in the past few months. Each episode has three or four stories on a single theme, a pretty uninteresting concept, but it’s all in the execution — I have yet to listen to a episode that did not deliver interesting ideas, moving moments or absurd hilarity, and sometimes all of the above. Do yourself a favour and listen for free here. It’s the sensibility that subjective stories have more honesty and humanity than objective journalism that gave me an angle on my piece and allowed me to take it in a more interesting direction.

Yoga Ipod image above taken from here. Thanks to Carma, Susan, Kirby and Ben for excellent feedback!

Almost a year ago I was struck with the idea that it would be interesting to make a kind of audio drama that took advantage of the MP3 player, to turn it into a kind of primitive interactive story. I grew up on computer text games like Zork and books of the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ilk so it was a natural fit. And here’s the result: the first 20 minute episode of “The Letter” that you can listen to on an MP3 player or the computer. At the end of each track, you decide what should happen next…

How To Listen/Play

On any MP3 player:
Right-click and save this zipped file, unzip it, and drop it into your player. [13 MP3 files, 11megs]

On the computer via a music player or iTunes:
You can play it via this Flash player, skipping ahead or behind via the audio number cues at the beginning of the track.

There’s a low-fi or hi-fi playlists of the episode, click one and see if it launches an external music player.

There’s also a bunch of different formats and sizes on this archive.org page.

If you have trouble, please let me know via the comments below!

Feel free to distribute, it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. I’d be happy to see other people make pick-your-own-podventures of their own. God knows I’m not the first to make something old new again — Decoder Ring Theatre and Joey Dubuc’s Neither Either Nor Or are two inspiring examples.

Credits

“The Letter”
Episode 1
a pick-your-own-podventure
written and produced by Jim Munroe
sound engineered by Lyle Crilly
and starring Kevin Fell and Luke Costello

with (in approximate order of appearance) Susan Bustos as the Choice Voice, Jim Munroe as Man-In-Black 1, Sean Lerner as Man-In-Black 2, Michael Higginson as Mike, Jessica Westhead as Stef, Guy Leshinski as Dr. Kinderson, Derek Wuenschirs as Other Voice, and Lyle Crilly as Alex.

Special thanks to Paul Lamoth and Matias Rozenberg for the use of their microphones, Mark Slutsky for the AAC action, and Susan Bustos, Guy Leshinski, Carma Jolly, Jon Sasaki, Sean Lerner and Gregg Taylor for excellent script feedback.