Corvus Elrod is a game designer and semionaut who explores and create games while communicating stories through game mechanics; the rules defining how a player interacts within a game's playspace.
Elrod is a staple at many gaming events and conferences such as the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle and the Game Developers Conference. He can often be found moderating panels at such events discussing story-telling and narrative in videogames.
He wore a plaid sport coa, a fedora and a QR Code pin on his lapel to LOGIN 2010 where he moderated a panel about the challenges of independent game development. On his feet, he wore purple Chuck Taylor high-tops with "semionaut" written on the sides. The word
Semionaut stems from the words "Semiotics"; the study of symbols, and "Naut"; explorer.
Unlike a semiotician, who studies how the mind reacts to symbols, a Semionaut looks to find symbols and create emotional responses from them. Elrod sees games mechanics as symbols.
"I'm interested in exploring what people's responses are and showing that by conciously creating game mechanics to communiticate a meaning, we can [have] more powerful story-telling experiences in videogames," he says.
As a story-teller in both improvisational theater and Role-playing games, he is both a confident and compelling speaker.
Elrod's personal history derives from improvised street theater. When performing, he only has roughly thirty seconds of passing audience attention. He learned that by implementing game mechanics into his performance the audience would react stronger.
One game that Elrod is working on is a narrative-focused pen-and-paper game system called The Honeycomb Engine. The core concepts of the game is story-telling and narrative above mathematics and battle-strategy.
Other games, like Dungeons and Dragons have their characters limited to a two-page sheet with stats and abilities defining how players can access the game.
Honeycomb's character sheet, however, features six pictures representing human attributes such as persistence, poise, and design. Players put exertion tokens on certain pictures to show skill in those areas. The rest of the game's mechanics comes from the story and universe the players decide on.
Another project of Elrod's is a gaming collaboration with Charles Berube, creator of the Wasabi Project, called Addicube.
Addicube is a game about little cube-like characters eating and developing traits of differently-colored algae they have consumed. The varying amount of algae the characters eat change the addicube's personality, color, and overall appearance.
If a player's addicube eats too many red cubes, it will become angred. If the player eats too many green cubes, it will become grenvious. The goal for players is to maintain a balanced diet in order to keep their Addicube's personality stable.
"I'm really curious to see how people interact", he says, "Are they going to be protective of their cubes? Are they going to make all their Addicubes angred? What are people going to do to try and figure out this system?"
Addicube is also an experiment in the game design process. Every part of the creation of the game will be posted online. Everything will be viewable; from the budget to the game's source code.
Many games that are created are never discussed or examined outside of the final project. By recording and posting every step in Addicube's design process, Elrod and Berube hope to both learn from and teach their community.
Elrod's blog can be found at http://corvus.zakelro.com/.
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