Author Archives: geoffreylong

Geoffrey Long is a media analyst, scholar, and storyteller exploring transmedia experiences, emerging entertainment platforms and the future of entertainment as the Lead Narrative Producer for the Narrative Design Team at Microsoft Studios. He is an alum of the MIT Comparative Media Studies program, a FoE Fellow with the Futures of Entertainment community, and a co-editor of the Playful Thinking book series from the MIT Press. His personal site can be found at geoffreylong.com.

So close, and yet…

Hat tip to David for pointing this out to me: my dreamed-of iPod wristwatch control is almost a reality. The trouble is, these guys did a rotten job of executing the concept: for starters, if you look at the controls they’re oriented the wrong way, so to use them properly you’d have to hold your […]

There goes classic gaming.

This is such crap: new Sony lockware prevents selling or loaning of games. Sony’s basically trying to kill – entirely – what miniscule efforts exist for classic gaming. I’m a book collector, and I’m constantly on the lookout for old hardcover editions from my favorite authors. Would I be the first one to read them? […]

When even your errands take entire days…

My word. I just spent Veteran’s Day frantically catching up on as many errands as possible, trying to clear off my desk before settling down to the real projects at hand this weekend: the rapidly-accumulating Major Project List. The first killer up on deck is the 10-page paper that’s due on Monday. Not a big […]

Web design sucks.

Maybe I’m just getting old, or maybe it’s just that I’ve been doing this for too long, but I’m getting really, really sick and tired of building websites with no imaginative content. Seriously. The same old lame brochureware stuff with few graphics, just a bunch of text in a semi-modern color palette, is just painful. […]

Powazek on Threadless.

Check it out – Derek’s got some posts up for review on Threadless. Go throw his designs some props and help a friend realize his dream as a fashion designer!   

Some thoughts on transmedia storytelling.

It’s been a while since I’ve made any reflective posts about media and my thoughts on such things. This is largely due to my spending most of my days up to my neck in the subject – when you spend all your time swimming in this stuff, it becomes difficult to pull back and really […]

Hallowent.

I suppose 9:30 in the morning is too early to post something with such a dreary title, but that’s about how I feel at the moment. “Hallowent” is sort of the past tense of “Halloween”, to my mind – Halloween, Halloweening, Hallowent. And even though the day just began, it’s pretty much a lost cause […]

Women and the world.

I woke up this morning to find two fantastic emails from old Kenyon friends in my inbox. The first was a final installment of Beth Roche’s cross-America letters, a series of missives dispatched by email from various stops in a drive from Massachusetts to Washington state. I remember the last time I drove across country […]

Oh, the weather outside is frightful…

I’ll post some notes about the Game Writing Conference soon (which was amazing), but I just wanted to point something out to the world. Today, October 29, 2005 at around 1:45 PM, Boston had its first snow. It’s falling in bg white flakes the size of quarters, and it’s gaining speed. Part of me thinks […]

Lunchtime quickies.

Couple of quick things while I wait for the microwave to ding: Massachusetts is currently being spanked with cold wind and torrential rain. Not good when you’re supposed to be leaving on a jet plane. “What the hell,” I growled as I punched up weather.com – and then I saw the culprit: Wilma, wending her […]