About Me

My real name is Michael Heron, and I am the dark-hearted despot at the heart of Epitaph. I was one of the admins over at Discworld MUD before I resigned because of professional differences. I don't have anything to do with them any more, although I do occasionally use them as an example in the discussions I have over at the the Textual Intercourse blog.

I started Epitaph round about Christmas of 2009. I'd been mulling over the idea of a survival horror MUD for a good while before I quit, mainly because I was growing tired of fantasy themes generally. I started off with a new distribution of the Discworld mudlib, and then started gutting the thing furiously until I managed to get rid of practically all of the things I used to hate about it. The result is Epitaph, which remains an ongoing project.

Links

I have a number of webpages for various projects, available here.

Publications

In real life I'm a university lecturer and researcher into accessibility and accessible games. For those who may be interested in my work, you should check out the following papers:

  1. Heron, M.J., Hanson, V.L, & Ricketts, I. (2013).  Accessibility Support with the ACCESS Framework.   The International Journal of Human Computer Interaction. Forthcoming. Seattle, Washington. [Available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10447318.2013.768139]
  2. Heron, M.J., Hanson, V.L, & Ricketts, I. (In Press).  The Technical Design of the ACCESS Framework.   The Fifth ACM SIGHCI Symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems. Forthcoming.  London, England.
  3. Heron, M.J (2013).  Likely to be Eaten by a Grue.   The Computer Games Journal 2(1).  Glasgow, Scotland. [Available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/134002484/M-Heron-Likely-to-be-eaten-by-a-Grue-the-relevance-of-text-games-in-the-modern-era]
  4. Heron, M.J., Hanson, V.L, & Ricketts, I. (2013).  Open Accessibility and Accessibility– Advantages and Limitations.   The Journal of Interaction Science. 1(1).  Cambridge, England. [Available Online at http://www.journalofinteractionscience.com/content/1/1/2]
  5. Vickers, S., Istance, H., Heron, M.J. (2013).  Accessible Gaming for People with Physical and Cognitive Disabilities: A Framework for Dynamic Adaptation.   Conference of Human Computer Interaction 2013.  Seattle, Washington.
  6. Townsend, J, Heron, M.J. (In Press).  Authorship and Autership in the Collaborative Development Process of Text-Based Games.  Chercher le Text: Locating the Text in Electronic Literature. Forthcoming.  Paris, France.
  7. Heron, M.J (2012).  Inaccessible Through Oversight: The Need for Inclusive Game Design.   The Computer Games Journal 1(1). Glasgow, Scotland. [Available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/134167208/M-Heron-Inaccessible-through-oversight-the-need-for-inclusive-game-design]
  8. Heron, M.J., Hanson, V., & Ricketts, I. (2011).  Accessibility Support with the ACCESS Framework.   Digital Engagement ’11. Newcastle, United Kingdom.
  9. Heron, M.J. (2011).  The ACCESS Framework: Reinforcement Learning for Accessibility and Cognitive Support for Older Adults (Doctoral dissertation).  [Available online at http://hdl.handle.net/10588/4902]
  10. Heron, M.J. & Bown, J. (2003).  Searching Trait Space.  Poster session presented at the European Conference on Artificial Life ’03.  Dortmund, Germany. 

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