Noah Wardrip-Fruin

He is the author of the text book that we are using in class and he recently gave a fantastic lecture at the Tisch School of the Arts discussing in depth the rationale behind his latest book, Expressive Processing.

I found the lecture to first and foremost be highly entertaining. I have to hand it to him, its not easy to make programming sound fun (for some people, anyways, myself included...). I was interested to hear his opinions regarding the dialogue that takes place within video games and former models programmers would use to communicate with the players. We came to discover certain models that are in fact mere manipulations of words and answers - they seem to make sense at first but after careful observation one can easily point out their flaws. Wardrip-Fruin's goal is to create a video game that conveys complex characters through their dialogue as the game draws on.

I was introduced to various video games in particular, Noah's favorite: Star Wars. He showed us on a projector a simulation of various scenes within the game that he has experienced. After he showed these to us we spent time decoding the meaning and trying to decipher ways that we could make it better. At the end, he discussed extremely complex ideas that while extremely fascinating, were quite difficult for me to understand.



Noah Wardrip-Fruin is the author of Expressive Processing and is a professor at University of California at Santa Cruz. Check him out through google if you are interested he was an awesome guy and a great teacher.