Slate Magazine discusses some innovations in making fabric, featuring SVAD assistant professor Anne Sullivan’s project, Loominary.
Loominary is a game system that uses a tabletop loom as the controller for the games. The games are written in Twine and the choices in the game are shown in distinct colors. The player weaves with the appropriate colored yarn to control the game, and in doing so weaves their choices into a scarf they are actively making through play. When game play is complete, the woven scarf will be unique to each player’s set of choices and exist as a more permanent record of their play session.
“When you beat a boss in a game, you have a unique story of how you got through it, and that tends to be what you kind of share with your friends. It’s not the story about the game, it’s what you did in the game,” Sullivan says in the article. “The problem is that a lot of games don’t capture that in any way, and so the inspiration for Loominary was … ‘How can we capture their story in a more tangible way?’”
Sullivan developed Loominary with Josh McCoy, a digital media professor at the University of California–Davis.