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Author of 80s classic The Hobbit didn’t know game was a hit

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The Hobbit stood out from the adventure games of the day in three ways, the first of which was its use of graphics. Many scenes in the game included a colour image that may have drawn at painfully slow speed but still offered a far richer experience than the text-only adventures of the day.

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Current_Events | Cyberculture | Games | Media | Writing

Results of the 18th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition

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The 18th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has ended. Congratulations to Marco Innocenti, whose “Andromeda Apocalypse” took first place! The top three games were:

Andromeda Apocalypse, by Marco Innocenti Eurydice, by Anonymous Guilded Youth, by Jim Munroe

The winners of the Miss Congeniality contest were:

Guilded Youth, by Jim Munroe Escape From Summerland, by Joey [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Games | Journalism | Literacy | Media | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology | Writing

What a 21st-Century English Major Can Do: Screencast Demo of an Inform 7 Text-Adventure Journalism Game

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Have I mentioned lately that I have some really awesome students? Here’s a narrated screencast, presenting a progress report on a term project that involves programming in Inform 7 to create a text-adventure game designed to teach student journalists how to cover a campus event.

This is what a 21st-century English major can [...]

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Skyfall Viral Uses Text Adventure to Seek Out New MI6 Agents

In anticipation of the film, Sony turned to Wieden+Kennedy to give fans the opportunity to serve alongside the Royal Secret Intelligence Service’s most famous fictional agent, by passing a secretive five-part examination conducted through an online text adventure game.

Finding the text adventure game in the first place required more than [...]

Academia | Amusing | Books | Current_Events | Design | Games | Modding | PopCult

Quidditch Comes to Seton Hillwarts

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Visitors often remark the campus reminds them of Hogwarts, so it’s fitting to learn that a Quidditch goal has been assembled at Seton Hill University, in preparation for a charity tournament Monday.

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Academia | Cyberculture | Games | Science

Monsters are People Too

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Study used D & D characters to test how subjects responded to eyegaze in human, humanoid, and monster characters.

Observers were presented with images selected from the popular fantasy game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D; figure 1a). The images could be of humans, creatures with eyes in the centre of the face (humanoids), [...]

Aesthetics | Books | Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Games | Humanities | Literacy | Literature | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Writing

After e-literature, there’s no going back

What is with the five-year-old photo illustrating this story that was published yesterday? That Kindle is ancient.

Born digital describes works that are created with a computer and are meant to be read on the computer. They’re not works that you print out. The computational aspect of the work is part of its aesthetic and [...]

Amusing | Culture | Education | Games | PopCult

Attention Seton Hill: Quidditch Is Postoned

Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Games | Technology | Usability

An alternate universe

My plans to use a Chromebook over the weekend didn’t go as well as I had hoped… In between family events I was pretty wiped out and didn’t have much time to experiment. After just 3 years as an Apple user, I found myself feeling very frustrated by a brief return to Windows (because I [...]

Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Games | Media | Social_Software | Writing

What’s next in game narrative, with Emily Short

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Something that I tended to think was unfortunate about certain MMO storytelling… you get these narratives where the NPCs have lots of really emotive things to say to you, and they want to throw you into this narrative. Then on the other hand, your interaction with the characters played by humans [...]