Bad News is going to be livestreamed this evening!
So, what is Bad News? It’s a one-player game that takes place in a procedurally-generated town and uses a live actor as an interface. Developed by James Ryan, Adam Summerville, and Ben Samuel at UCSC, it combines generation with improv acting in an innovative intersection between games and theater.
It is inspired by things like Dwarf Fortress. This write-up in Rolling Stone’s Glixel is a good overview of how it works: a hundred and forty years of town history are generated, and then the player interacts with the people in the town while James Ryan, as the background wizard, looks up relevant data and Ben Samuel uses his professional acting skills to portray the characters that the player interacts with. (Here’s a video with some snippets of the game.)
Before now, the only way to see the game in action was to be at one of the few venues that it was being presented at. This is going to be the first time that it is livestreamed.
I saw it at the SF MOMA a couple of months ago, and was one of the people encouraging them to record the game. I’m really excited that they’re making this happen, because it’s the kind of thing that I think more people should know about.
The livestream will be here at 4 PM Pacific/7PM Eastern: https://www.twitch.tv/scholarsplay