Jim Munroe – Page 5 – Writer • Creator • Producer

Wonderland: A Solvitur Ambulando Mystery

May 6, 2013

Do you know the Latin phrase “solvitur ambulando”? Used by the wandering scholars of medieval Europe, it means “walking solves it”. It’s always been true for me, as someone for whom walking is both wonderfully meditative and creatively inspiring. I started thinking about using this sentiment in a game context, and came up with an idea that coder Callum Hay and sound designer/composer Adam Axbey were both into, too. We realized a proof-of-concept this past weekend at the Toronto Game Jam.

Wonderland: A Solvitur Ambulando Mystery is an app for the iPhone. You listen to an audio story set in Toronto’s Junction neighbourhood in 1915 — the projectionist of the Wonderland, one of the city’s first movie theatres, makes a grim discovery in the aisle one morning. You can listen to the beginning of the superbly produced and acted clip after the jump. (more…)
April 18, 2013

Heading to Chicago next week for a cool Let’s Play game event (organized by the designer of the amazing Kentucky Route Zero) and the Q&A for the Chicago Anarchist Film Festival screening of GHOSTS.
Take Your Seashells Out of Your Ears!

April 2, 2013

Today is the launch of KTR 451, a game I developed for the Toronto Public Library. Drawing on the themes and characters in Fahrenheit 451 (the TPL’s One Book this year), it’s a simple alternate reality game — part scavenger hunt, part audio drama — and people in Toronto can play it by calling the phone number above. There’s three missions, one per week, until a live event on April 22nd.

Naturally, this was a huge thrill for me on a number of levels. (more…)
Pipe Trouble

March 6, 2013

Pipe Trouble is an arcade-style game like many of the “pipe-connecting” genre — except you’re connecting natural gas pipelines in Alberta. Build too close to farms and livestock and risk incurring an eco-saboteur’s explosive wrath. Build too far around and your boss gets upset that you’re wasting money. It’s a serious game that attempts to model the tensions in the region while providing engaging gameplay, with a score by members of Fucked Up (who I think should be credited as Fracked Up, given the issue we’re addressing).

Play the free trial here in your browser. A percentage of the $1.99 full version for iPad and Android goes to the David Suzuki Foundation.

Update: Due to the Sun’s sloppy journalism, there’s been a bit of a media furor, but unfortunately in a “taxpayer dollars paid for this?!” vein rather than about the more important environmental or industry issues the game addresses. We’ve issued a press release in response.

My thoughts on it below. (more…)
Why Q&A’s are Eff’n A

February 12, 2013

Heading to the west coast this Friday for the San Francisco Indie Film Fest screenings (as well as doing a reading and then a talk at UCLA). At this point we’ve attended almost a dozen screenings of Ghosts, from Seoul, Korea to Poznan, Poland, and the Q&As are — pretty fun. Really fun, actually. I’ll tell you why I found that surprising, below.

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GHOSTS Plays Cloud City: iTunes, Amazon, Xbox & PS3

January 14, 2013

Put your trillion dollar coins away! Ghosts With Shit Jobs is available to rent for as little as $4.99. Our lo-fi sci-fi mockumentary about the slums of Toronto in 2040 is now in wide digital release at the links below.

To help support this we’re offering to do 20 videochat Q&As between now and when the Debt Ceiling falls in. To enter, sign up over here and plan a GHOSTS screening party of five or more people in January and February. Then, if you’re one of the lucky 20, one of our lo-fi faces will be beamed via sci-fi into your very home!

iTunes / Amazon (US only) / Xbox / PSN / Vudu

Trailer / First 20 minutes

For people looking for DRM-free options, we recommend buying the DVD and then ripping it.

(And sure, Cloud City is a bit of an ethically dubious place. But it’s not like Lando would sell us out or anything, that dude is solid!)
GHOSTS screening and Q&A, Vancouver

December 5, 2012

Just booked the Vancouver screening for Ghosts With Shit Jobs (Tickets | Facebook) for two weeks hence — that makes it a round dozen! Plus, doing a talk at the Full Indie game meetup group. Been 5 years since I been in the city, looking forward to it. Click through to see the rad poster. (more…)
Award Loot and Undoing the Ending

November 10, 2012

The verdict is in: people really liked Guilded Youth (it just took 3rd in the Interactive Fiction Competition, and 1st in the Ms. Congeniality competition) but hated the ending. Of the fourteen or so reviews I’ve seen over half of them expressed being disappointed by the ending or finding it abrupt.

A previous novel of mine, Everyone In Silico, also had an unconventional ending. I figured it’d be irresponsible of me to tie everything up with a neat little bow, given the complexity of the politics. Depriving readers of their resolution and catharsis made some of them upset, but it was by design and I stand by it.

Not so with Guilded Youth. I just kind of dropped it when I was done. Me and Matt considered it a lark, a nostalgic trifle, so much so that we didn’t anticipate people would care what happened to the quickly sketched characters. But of course we’re delighted. And because it’s not a physical book like Silico — and the digital format allows it — I decided to add two more scenes to give people more time with the awkward adventurers. It’s still charmingly low resolution, but with more of a resolution!

So now you can play version 2.0 of the game, with a better ending. (If you’ve already played it you can start with the command “skipthru” to get to the dining room scene.) (more…)
Guilded Youth, a text game with ASCII animation

October 3, 2012

I’ve just submitted a game to the Interactive Fiction Competition that you can play now if you like.

You play Tony, a fourteen-year old thief who needs some help looting the legendary Oakville Manor. Luckily it’s the 1980s and finding fellow adventurers is just a modem squeal away…

Notes on the game below.

UPDATE: “Suffice it to say that it’s one of the most evocative portrayals of our collective disaffected BBS-enhanced adolescence I’ve experience in a game, effortlessly giving surprisingly rounded life to characters you only know briefly via a few descriptive lines and Hammill’s skilled caricature.” —Brandon Boyer, Venus Patrol
(more…)
Ann Arbor, Ottawa, Austin, and Tucson GHOSTS Appearances

September 8, 2012

In the next month I’ll be visiting a bunch of cities to do Q&As after the screenings of Ghosts With Shit Jobs. If you know folks in these cities, it would be great if you spread the word!

Ann Arbor (Sept. 9, Workantile)
Ottawa (Sept. 14 [with Q&A], Sept 15 & 16, Mayfair Theatre)
Austin (Sept 19, Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek)
Tucson (Sept 27, Arizona Underground Film Fest)

Note that the Austin one will only happen if 30 tickets are reserved in the next 4 days as we’re using Tugg to gauge interest. (UPDATE: Austin is Go!) We can do it in other towns in the US too, so if you’re interested in bringing GHOSTS to your town in November, just fill out this form and we can start to try and make it happen! If you’re not in the US, just email us directly.
Unmanned, But Not Unappreciated

August 24, 2012

Oh, that? That’s just my trophy nook. I don’t have enough for a case but I fill it out with other precious things like my gem-studded golden turtle.

I’ve won some awards before but I think this is the first meatspace trophy. It’s from Games for Change, who liked Unmanned, a game I did the writing for.

It’s also nominated in two other awesome upcoming fests, Indiecade (in Los Angeles) and Fantastic Arcade (in Austin). This is wicked because it gives me a great excuse to go there and hang out with amazing game makers and sneak in a few screenings of Ghosts With Shit Jobs as well!
GHOSTS Q&A and Lo-fi Sci-fi Making Workshop

August 10, 2012

Heading to Poland next week for Transatlantyk Poznan International Film and Music Festival. They’re screening GHOSTS and I’m doing a Lo-fi Sci-fi *cough* master class after the Friday screening.