Aaron A. Reed has worked as a travel writer, web monkey, offensive t-shirt designer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and murder mystery producer. His fiction has appeared in "Fantasy & Science Fiction" magazine, and his interactive fiction has been acclaimed in the new media community. In 2006, Reed’s “Whom the Telling Changed” competed in the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemakers Competition, was selected for publication in the "Electronic Literature Collection Volume One," and was nominated for "Best Script" in the GameShadow Innovation in Games Festival. His interactive novel “Blue Lacuna,” released in 2009, is by some measures the largest interactive fiction ever created.
Aaron A. Reed has worked as a travel writer, web monkey, offensive t-shirt designer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and murder mystery producer. His fiction has appeared in "Fantasy & Science Fiction" magazine, and the story "Shutdown/Retrovival" was selected for that publication's "Best of 2003" audio book compilation.
More recently, Aaron has created groundbreaking works of interactive fiction. His IF "Whom the Telling Changed" competed in the 2006 Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemakers Competition in Park City, Utah, was selected for the "Electronic Literature Collection Volume One," and was nominated for "Best Script" in the GameShadow Innovation in Games Festival. "Telling" has since been studied in new media courses in Australia and Sweden.
In 2009, Aaron released an IF novel, Blue Lacuna, which, according to one reviewer, "must be mentioned in any discourse on the maturation and development of interactive fiction." With nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, Blue Lacuna is one of the largest interactive fictions in existence. An explorable story about the nature of choice and happiness, the novel includes a major character who evolves and develops a unique relationship with the player/reader over the course of the narrative. Whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes is dependent on how he is treated in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work’s ten chapters.
A companion web experience, "blueful," was hailed by readers as “simply beautiful,” “intriguing and wonderful,” “fantastic,” “overwhelmingly cool,” “spooky and marvelous,” “the weirdest poetry medium I’ve seen,” “crazy,” “enthralling,” “an incredible ride,” “a tour de force of loveliness,” and “a real milestone in Web 2.0 storytelling.”
Reed is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz, where he continues to experiment with new forms of electronic literature and participatory storytelling.
Aaron A. Reed has worked as a travel writer, web monkey, offensive t-shirt designer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and murder mystery producer. His fiction has appeared in "Fantasy & Science Fiction" magazine, and the story "Shutdown/Retrovival" was selected for that publication's "Best of 2003" audio book compilation.
More recently, Aaron has created groundbreaking works of interactive fiction. His IF "Whom the Telling Changed" competed in the 2006 Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemakers Competition in Park City, Utah, was selected for the "Electronic Literature Collection Volume One," and was nominated for "Best Script" in the GameShadow Innovation in Games Festival. "Telling" has since been studied in new media courses in Australia and Sweden.
In 2009, Aaron released an IF novel, Blue Lacuna, which, according to one reviewer, "must be mentioned in any discourse on the maturation and development of interactive fiction." With nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, Blue Lacuna is one of the largest interactive fictions in existence. An explorable story about the nature of choice and happiness, the novel includes a major character who evolves and develops a unique relationship with the player/reader over the course of the narrative. Whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes is dependent on how he is treated in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work’s ten chapters.
A companion web experience, "blueful," was hailed by readers as “simply beautiful,” “intriguing and wonderful,” “fantastic,” “overwhelmingly cool,” “spooky and marvelous,” “the weirdest poetry medium I’ve seen,” “crazy,” “enthralling,” “an incredible ride,” “a tour de force of loveliness,” and “a real milestone in Web 2.0 storytelling.”
One of the unifying characteristics of Reed’s work is an attempt to include as wide an audience as possible, even groups often excluded from the computer gaming or interactive art worlds. Both “Lacuna” and “Telling” allow players to choose their own gender and the gender of a love interest. Reed has cited growing up gay and non-Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah as an influence on his desire to tell stories that include as many people as possible. “I've always felt that one of the strengths of interactive stories is allowing the player to identify more strongly with the protagonist than they could in a normal work of fiction,” he says. “Particularly in the often macho or sexist gaming world, there are few positive role models for young gay people.”
Reed’s interactive fiction has reached other ostracized communities as well. His 2003 piece "Gourmet" has been included as built-in software with thousands of BrailleNote readers, and the author continues to receive e-mail from blind children and adults alike who are delighted to discover computer games they can play. Likewise, many of the most vocal fans of “Blue Lacuna” have been people 65 and over, a demographic the mainstream game industry almost entirely ignores.
Reed is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz, where he continues to experiment with new forms of electronic literature and participatory storytelling.
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