Ben Spalding studies multi-player games as sites of collaborative storytelling. He creates games and software tools as part of his design practice. Ben streams weekly as part of the Center for Games and Playable Media sponsored game studies Twitch stream, Scholars Play (twitch.tv/ScholarsPlay). In addition to his work as a designer, Ben has taught game design programs for middle and high school students in Santa Cruz and New York City.
Ben's thesis, Hydras Like Stories, investigates new methods for visualizing and understanding the unique qualities of multi-player narrative for improved multi-player narrative design in digital games. The work investigates how tool-making can operate as a non-prescriptive form of design research in an art-making context. Using the image of a many-headed, fantastic creature, the work makes the act of constructing multi-player narratives strange and open-ended. Each of the free-standing modules that comprise the tool encourages the user to explore an unknown, drawing on practices of critical design to unravel and investigate the assumptions of use embedded in the software object.
Multi-player narrative design
Critical software tools
Intimacy in artificial intelligence
UCSC Arts Division and Plantronics Creativity & Innovation Scholar
