September 15, 2009 – Peace Corps Worldwide

Mali RPCV Writes Interactive Narrative Game Of His Peace Corps Story

Sep 15 2009

On the website Gamasutra, the Art & Business of Making Games there is a piece on Aaron Oldenburg, who was a PCV in Mali and has come up with a great idea for a game that tells the story of his time in Africa. Now at the University of Baltimore as an assistant professor, he has created an interactive narrative, much like being a counselor for the player, he said during a Tuesday session at the GDC Austin Game Writers Summit. Here is his story, as reported by Kris Graft: Oldenburg is the man behind the Flash-based interactive narrative called The Mischief of Created Things, a work based on his two years as a Peace Corps worker in the West African country of Mali. During his time there, he had journal entries, letters home, and many pictures of his experiences. “Coming back and telling stories wasn’t satisfying. It didn’t go . . .

Better Than A Dan Brown Novel

Sep 15 2009

Here’s what iUniverse’s “product description” says of novel Tanga, written by Eric Madeen, an RPCV from Gabon and currently an associate professor of English at Tokyo City University. After reading this “product description” you can’t say RPCVs lack imagination! TANGA is a novel of forbidden love set in a rain forest village in the heart of Africa. It seamlessly merges adventure, romance, and the psycho-thriller while deconstructing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, with David undergoing the Kurtz syndrome — to a lesser degree, of course. Like Kurtz, David enters the heart of “blackest” Africa as a white man, and as a Peace Corps volunteer of genuine idealism, he finds himself both “corrupted by” and also empathizing with the Africans he becomes involved with, and tempted to “go native.” In sum, TANGA is an irresistible love story. From the moment David sees Assam naked in the stream, right up through his final . . .

Archive - September 15, 2009