Last night found the Kill Screen crew at the Winter show for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.  The bi-annual event is a showcase for the semester’s projects and can often provide a look into the future of technology. (Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley was a grad.) While the phrase “because you can doesn’t mean you should” could apply to many of the projects, a couple caught our eye and we’ll point to them throughout the week.

Zach Schwartz, Martín Bravo, Nara Kasbergen, Rachel Slaff, and Ruth Spencer, students in Clay Shirky’s Designing Conversational Spaces course, created something called the Written World. It’s the ASCII look of Dwarf Fortress combined with the story-telling of Sleep is Death. 

The Written World is an experiment, based on yourworldoftext. We’ve placed a free-form text canvas on top of Google maps and added geolocation* functionality to see what happens when we combine online chat with the pre-existing relationships that are inherent to physical location and real-world places. For now, we’ve limited WW to New York users, but will open it up to everyone soon.

Take a look. Leave a story!

-Jamin Warren