Aaron A. Reed

Aaron A. Reed has worked as a travel writer, web monkey, offensive t-shirt designer, graphic artist, filmmaker, and murder mystery producer. His fiction has appeared in “Fantasy & Science Fiction” magazine, and the story “Shutdown/Retrovival” was selected for that publication's “Best of 2003” audio book compilation.

More recently, Aaron has created groundbreaking works of interactive fiction. His IF “Whom the Telling Changed” competed in the 2006 Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemakers Competition in Park City, Utah, was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume One, and was nominated for Best Script in the GameShadow Innovation in Games Festival. “Telling” has since been studied in new media courses in Australia and Sweden.

In 2009, Aaron released an IF novel, Blue Lacuna, which, according to one reviewer, “must be mentioned in any discourse on the maturation and development of interactive fiction.” With nearly 400,000 words of prose and natural language source code, Lacuna is one of the largest interactive fictions in existence. An explorable story about the nature of choice and happiness, the novel includes a major character who evolves and develops a unique relationship with the player/reader over the course of the narrative. Whether he becomes a friend, a mentor, a lover, a sycophant, or one of eight other archetypes is dependent on how he is treated in up to 70 distinct scenes and conversations over the work's ten chapters.

A companion web experience, "blueful," was hailed by readers as “simply beautiful,” “intriguing and wonderful,” “fantastic,” “overwhelmingly cool,” “spooky and marvelous,” “the weirdest poetry medium I've seen,” “crazy,” “enthralling,” “an incredible ride,” “a tour de force of loveliness,” and “a real milestone in Web 2.0 storytelling.”

Reed is currently pursuing an MFA in Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz, where he continues to experiment with new forms of electronic literature and participatory storytelling. (Source: Author's website.)