Design: March 2004 Archive Page

--Old School Moveable Type (MGK)

Real moveable type. Ever since I investigated the meaning of the name of the character "Shurdlu" in Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine, I've had a longing to learn how to use an old-fashioned printing press -- one that actually presses the paper. As much as I love the power of "push-button publishing for the masses," there is still something to be said about the care that must go into getting it right when one uses a real printing press.

Today, those never-ending online "massively multiplayer" games like "EverQuest" have matured into mainstream, vibrant attractions, drawing hundreds of thousands of paying customers - male and female.

But their growth appears almost stagnant compared to the popularity spike for multiplayer online shoot'em-ups and other mostly war-themed fare geared toward users of console systems, led by Sony Corp.'s Playstation2 and Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox. --Matt Slagle --Tale of two video game worlds: Online consoles soar, PCs stumbleAP Wire)

I'm looking at a dead pigeon laying on the sidewalk, headless, and I wonder: ?What am I doing here?? --David ThomasDo You Know the Way to San Jose (Buzzcut)

So begins David's coverage of the Game Developer's Conference, where the most interesting-sounding panel seems to be on "serious games".

I can't seem to figure out how to permalink to short story items that don't display the "more" link. For the page with the pigeon posting, the best I can do is send you to Buzzcut's home page.

Sarah Jane Sloane, "Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom."
Cynthia Cox, "Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom"
Bonne Smith, "All Along the Blogwatch Tower"
Lisa Langstraat, respondent: "In Blog We Trust"Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004)

I wasn't able to meet Sarah Jane Sloan, whose dissertation on interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction, Virtual Realities, and the Reading-Writing Relationship, is a tremendously valuable resource for the study of text adventure games as narratives. Sloane wasn't actually here -- she was arriving at the conference late, so Langstraat read Sloane's paper.

Sloane identified the start of the weblog culture with the 1996 Geocities offer of free home pages, and then credited Jorn Barger with the term "weblogging" in 1997. There's a great deal of difference between a Geocities home page and a blog; as far as describing the development of personal online publishing, the chronology makes sense, but the format of the blog was being used by the authors of the earliest web pages. And Barger didn't exactly coin the term "weblogging" -- in a Dec. 1997 newsgroup posting, he announced that he was going to start a log of his daily web readings, and the name of the file where he placed this log ended with "weblog.htm". His post didn't actually use the word "weblog" in its present sense, and he credits Frontier and Scripting News for the form.

All three presenters treated weblogging as experimental, all three were blogging in writing classes (two of which were, I believe, freshman composition, and one graduate writing course), and the latter two particularly followed at format of "what I thought I was going to do with blogs" followed by "what actually happened".

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up -- instructors who don't actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don't make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are "really" bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

Cox observed that, despite her explanation of what she expected in terms of the length, frequency, and content of student blogging, students tended to find their own values for the online writing that they did.

[Whoops, the next session is about to start... this blog is unfinished, but I'd better post it now.]

Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game.

I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz's presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge.

--Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking  (The Dancing Sausage)

--Technorati's Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati)

What Technorati used to call its "Link Cosmos" appears to have been replaced by "Web Conversations." The speech bubble icon that calls up a list of inboud links referencing a particular website is now part of the Technorati logo. Much less new-agey, much more down-to-earth. I haven't time to investigate that just now, but I thought I'd note it. At first glance, it looks like Technorati is trying to retool itself as a site for writers...

No assembly lines. No wireless Internet service or lattes Most work was done with hand or horses. Unlike modern ?death march? projects, 27 people actually died in the course of engineering the Brooklyn bridge.

Modern web developer	Washington Roebling's team
3 week / month release cycle	14 year release cycle
Electricity	Horses
Coffee, doughnuts and air conditioning	Water and the elements (think muggy NYC summers)
Carpal tunnel syndrome	The bends
Layoffs	27 Deaths

If nothing else, the Brooklyn bridge is a reminder of what difficult projects are truly like. Sitting at a desk all day arguing through bug triage meetings might be frustrating, but it'snothing compared to what these people had to go through.

--Programmers, designers and the Brooklyn Bridge (UI Web)

Via Tomalak.

--Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki)

Here's part of a screen capture, showing the development of the "file manager" icon in Windows, from the original release to today. (On the site, clicking the icon takes you to another page that has screen captures of the interfaces for the various applications.)

The development of the icon reflects the change from files existing on floppy disks (which needed to be regularly swapped in and out of the early computers) to the metaphor of the file cabinet (presumably more familiar to computer users than the computer).

This page demonstrates how the development of the icon seems to lag behind the technology. How many websites still use what looks like a dot-matrix printer as the icon for "print this page"? The second to last icon in the list above looks like a PC Junior from the late 1980s, with its tiny horizontal cabinet. I guess they wanted enough room to emphasize the screen instead of the CPU, which is a sign that computer users were expected to think of the screen when manipulating their files, not the bits in the CPU (or the papers in the metaphorical file cabinet). The rightmost icon, which shows a flatscreen monitor and a tower case, is for Windows XP Professional; clearly Microsoft expects those users to have cutting edge equipment. The mouse icon has the center scrolling wheel and the keyboard has the curvy wrist rest -- both are recognizably Microsoft computer accessories.

My computer, like those of most on our campus, is black -- but Microsoft probably isn't interested in having its icons make users think of Dell. Does any Windows user actually own a flatscreen monitor with a plain white frame?

[T]he main thing that's hard to do in IF is build a story where there's a lot of internal character development as opposed to external action. There are some ways to approach it, but they're all challenging, and there aren't very many examples of IF where people have done it successfully before. Whereas if you're writing a book, you can just sit down and write some lines of internal monologue for your protagonist, and it's not inherently different from writing a fight scene or dialogue or anything else. --Emily Short, interviewed by Bill Loguidice --Interactive Fiction and Feelies: An Interview with Emily Short  (Armchair Arcade)

The Great Figure

I'm about to teach Death of a Salesman in my "Intro to LIterary Studies" class. It's part of a unit on literary criticism, so after we discuss such topics as "Is Willy Loman a Tragic Hero?" and the formal experimentalism called for in the stage directions, I'm hoping to ask my students to look at this play in a greater literary context. I'm going to start by introducting them to William Carlos Williams's "The Great Figure" and Charles Demuth's "The Figure 5 in Gold."

A unit on Williams and Demuth on the "Model School Library" doesn't preserve the spacing in Williams's original poem... it makes no sense at all as a few lines of prose.

By the way, I stumbled across a plucky little website that argues Munch's "The Scream" is no good.

Update: Fixed the broken URL. (Thanks, Mike.)

Using voice-recognition middleware developed by ScanSoft, Lifeline can recognize over 5,000 words and 100,000 phrases. In practice, that means that the game's main character, Rio, will understand anything that's relevant to her predicament, as well as many things that aren't.

Lifeline is thus a unique step toward deeper player immersion in the game world, but not simply because of the technology. It's because although Rio is the main character, "you" are not Rio -- "you" are another survivor, trapped in the security room of the space station, who is watching Rio on the security monitors and giving her advice. --Talk Your Way Out of Trouble  (Wired)

>Crowther's text-parser reborn? This particular game doesn't interest me very much, but the technology seems promising.

Nobody won. Nobody even came close.

But that didn't stop organizers of the DARPA Grand Challenge from declaring an unusual race across the Mojave Desert a spirited success. --Marsha Walton

--Robots fail to complete Grand Challenge (CNN)

We're safe, for a little while longer, from the robot rebellion that will inevitably overwhelm us.

The effects of music on performance on a computer-mediated problem-solving task were examined. Participants completed the task in anonymous dyads as they were exposed to either Classical music, Punk music, or No Music. Results indicate that those in the Classical music condition performed better on the problem solving-task than those in the Punk music or No Music conditions. However, those listening to the Classical music offered more off-task comments during the task than those listening to No Music. Implications for website designers are discussed. --Christine Phillips --Does Background Music Impact Computer  (Usability News)

Via the reborn Webword. (Welcome back, John.)

What woman could resist a wedding proposal in the form of a brand-new computer? Johnson popped the question by etching the message, "Will you do me the honor?" into the side of the machine.
Photo: Courtesy Michael Johnson
--With This Rig, I Do Thee Wed  (Wired)

Found via Work in Progress, where Julie Young prays, "Let this never happen to me."

Princeton Videogame Conference: PrologueJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Presenters have started to gather for Princeton's videogame conference. About eight of us met for some socialization last night. On the way home, I misread my map, managed to get myself taken to the wrong Red Roof Inn. This is all rather ironic, since part of my talk covers map-making in Will Crowther's "Colossal Cave Adventure."

I just shook hands briefly with Nick Montfort while on the way to make copies of my handouts. I'd better get back to the coffee and donuts... More later.

Today's computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It's just like "Space, we've done that!" -- a few inches of exploration and some people think it's over.....Today's arbitrarily constructed computer world is also based on paper simulation, or WYSIWYG. That's where we're stuck in the current model, where most software seems to be mapped to paper. ("WYSIWYG" generally means "What You See is What You Get"-- meaning what you get *when you print it OUT*). In other words, paper is the flat heart of most of today's software concepts. --Theodore Nelson --Way Out of the Box (Ted Nelson's EPrint Archive)

Link via The Great Lettuce Head.

Nelson writes "the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper," but as Nick Montfort reminds us in his "Continuous Paper," computer culture was well-established before screens replaced the rolls of paper streaming through print terminals and teletypes.

The document quoted above is an example of Nelson's version of a two-way web, part of the "transquotation" concept in his Xanadu. His ideas challenge too many people's notions of writing, ownership, and locality to catch on in the mainstream (at least for now). The freak-your-mind possibilities of this implementation of open-source text sound fantastic. I'm sure this has been debated in the RSS/XML/Whatever debates that often gets A-list bloggers riled up. I need to get a bigger job jar -- mine's overflowing as it is. But here's a light piece about Xanadu and transclusion.

It's a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. --Jakob Nielsen --Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox)

Note... he's specifically talking about research into design -- he's not saying qualititaive research is always better than quantitative research.