Best in Class

Between 1990 and 2000, the over-all mean G.P.A. of high-school students increased from 2.68 to 2.94, which is attributable in part to grade inflation and in part to the fact that students are working harder. Last year, more than a million students took at least one A.P. course. During the nineteen-nineties, the percentage of students…

SMU lecturer takes heat for telling blog

The educator’s anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university “in the South,” spun tales of spoiled-rich “Ashleys” with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal. “At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications,” the professor wrote, describing her charges as “barely literate,”…

Life after the Video Game Crash

Check out the rather startling difference between the Atari 2600 title Jet Goblins Attack from 1980 and The Legend of Zelda just seven years later: The yellow block in the first screen is Batman. Now compare Goldeneye (1997) to Red Faction 2 (2004). Same seven-year span: We’re on a technological plateau. The next real leap,…

A Gamer's Manifesto

If the new consoles are built with a graphics-first mentality, how easy is it going to be to make games that stretch the boundaries of game logic and player freedom? And if so, can we at least have our damned adventure games back? But there’s another, less-obvious side of that muffin: if a machine is…