Technology: March 2006 Archive Page

As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games. Now an entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it - and it plays these games in different ways. --Will Wright --Dream Machines (Wired)

Fine example of a WW II Enigma cipher machine in a very good condition and a great history; full functional. Year of construction 1941 by Manufacturer Chiffriermaschinen Gesellschaft Heimsoeth and Rinke, Berlin. The Enigma machine is placed in an oak woodwork case. Three high-quality, all-metal, matched rotors and an Umkehrwalze ?B?. The rotors are continuous numbered; serial numbers has been removed. There are two spare rotors in an additional small wooden box. Plug board is lettered QWERTZU?, wheels numbered 1-26. 100% Original!!! No Copy!! --Enigma 3 Walzen Chiffriermaschine Chiper Weltkrieg 1941 (eBay)

Wanna buy an enigma machine?

Great photos of the German code machine.

Graham Nelson simulated one of these machines in his text adventure game Jigsaw, and as a result I feel like I've operated one of them.

The decline of handwriting and the rise of e-mail and text messaging has been highlighted in a new survey of media consumption in the digital age.

It suggests that half of written communication is by e-mail, 29% by text message and just 13% by pen and paper. --E-mail and text 'replace writing' (BBC)

But take a look at this detail about methodology: "The IPA TouchPoints survey was based on 5,000 people who updated an electronic diary every half-hour for a week."

If the data gathering mechanism is online, that is going to skew the data in favor of electronic writing.

The History of the Future of Writing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

These are rough notes, typed as the presenters were speaking, and lightly edited back in my hotel room before being posted online.

Helen J. Burgess Washington State University. "Whatever Happened to My MOO?"

Administered Appalachia Moo, had fun building and coding, "absolutely no fun interacting with anybody in it." Likes coding objects.

Talking about how moos are disappearing. "I miss my moo, and I wish it would come back, but it won't."

For a while, it seemed as if Moos and VR were the next big thing. Lambda Moo, Diversity University. Usability problem, the geek problem, and the learning curve inherent in both teaching writing and teaching mooing. Blogs and wikis, in the post moo world, we're moving back towards text as narrative. "Even my mom has a blog. The question i want to ask today is, 'Whatever happened to my moo?'"

Made the intriguing argument that the motion away from moos and towards blogs is a conservative movement, a retreat from earlier attempts to consider writing as code. Blogs have become the medium of choice for journals, self-reflection.... sees blogs as a "conservative move." Said that "given that the mainstream media are pretty slow," blogs may look radical to MSM.

The truth is that "moos freaked us out." Asked to think of ourselves as objects as well as words. "We're no more or less important than any object in the moo." The move to blogs represents a retreat to familiar narrative, and expresses an anxiety about thinking of ourselves as coded objects. "We're moving back in time."

We still find narrative blogs so comforting because they don't force us to think in this manner.

"The retreat to the textual identity construction of the blog" is misleading. Blogs are composed of database objects, discreet chunks, that complicates this sense of blogs as narrative.

[In both cases, the fact that blogs have an easier learning curve means that more non-geeks access blogs than moos, so naturally the sense by which those blog authors think of their online writing will differ from the sense that smaller, more elite group of moo-ers had when they were coding their text. "Push-button publication for the masses," formerly the slogan for MovableType. --DGJ]

The blog objects can be tagged as a category and recategorized by editing a database.

The chunking and recategorization of the database-driven blog makes us relate to the blog as if it is object oriented -- though technically the databases are relational rather than object-oriented. Second Life -- in contrast, it is "true life action" animated. But the basics in Second Life are the same.

You can adjust your avatar according to sliders "so you can make your boobs go -- whoo!" – (gesturing out and in with hands… laughter).

"Looks suspiciously like The Sims Online." The Sims in Second Life are much more like MOOs than they are like games. There's no real point to them... the point is that you build. You can do anything you wanted.

For her, the interaction, building, describing and coding was more fun. "I've seen really bad implementations of writing classes inside Moos." MOOs viewed as the ancestors, not of writing environments, but coding and building environments. "And that's what happened to my moo."


Michael Day, "The History and Future of Machine Logic"

Day -- "I don't claim any originality for anything I'm going to say today." Two scenarios -- one's kind of doomsday, and one's kind of fun.

Doomsday. Most would agree writing has changed quite a bit, with students coming to us with a great deal of experience in digital media. As teachers of writing or composition, we're faced with the need to cover a lot of venues and territories, and the discipline of comp is struggling ot keep up.

Students are adept at social networking interfaces, video games, and informal e-mal. Referred to Kathy Yancey's past keynote, which emphasized the value of keeping up with student multimedia use.

Day referred to Youtube and Flickr and praised the mashups our students are producing.

Day referred to a number of automated processes for marking papers, with vendors claiming that the software does a good job of agreeing with the grades assigned by human assessors.

Software can be fooled by contentless writing that's gibberish but follows the semantic patterns expected by the software.

Day said the Texas Tech model is better, in that the human graders mark papers, though the computer makes that process smoothed. Day wonders what we're losing when students can no longer schmooze and sway their evaluators, since rhetoric is all about schmoozing and swaying.

Day paints a picture in which only the elite classes are marked by the instructors who actually teach the class. A second-tier would be a situation in which student writers are evaluated by Wal-Mart -- that is, humans who don't have personal relationships with the authors. A third tier will only be evaluated by machines.

But is it so bad to use computers to help us write?

It's not the technologies themselves, but the ways they are used to which we have to pay attention. Yes, they can be panoptic and oppressive, but what if we used it in the formative stages in their writing, not the final evaluative stage. Will ETS let us "play" with these tools?

What if the computer were "kind of a straight man, or a differently intelligenced entity" and what if the computer's role was to help us get beyond the limits of our own platitudes and reasoning, could force us out of the box, provide new word for us, new ways of saying.

What about the possibility that computers can help us find new mindsets? Help us create analogies, helping us break out of conventional writing and thinking.

Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator
Yong Poets "Just For Fun" Word Play

Echoed Lessig's consideration of your students as "The Remix Generation" and praised Lessig's talk from last year.

Computer software can help us make the stretch between the known and the unknown.

Voice recognition software and its role in the composition process... we've all had that moment when the student can say it, but can't write it out. "What if we deliberately programmed the computer to misunderstand" and transcribe something else, in order to force composers out of the box.

Introduced the concept of "Babbles" from RiverMOO -- a text game involving software that grabs a "markov chain" (? – sorry, I didn’t catch that) to construct automated orations. He amused the 20 or so in the audience with an emotive oral interpretation of this hilarious mashed-up drivel.

Like most people in the field, Day recommends that we pay attention to the ways computer evaluation can be oppressive, while being open to the ways that it can help us.


Laura Gurak, University of Minnesota, St. Paul. "Writing as Code, Code as Writing."

Began with a personal reflection on how she dropped out of school in her 20s, got an apprenticeship in the printing business, and worked in a small print shop where she learned the business just when computers were changing it.

Reflected on the time she realized she'd spend a lot of time typing. Notes that some people simply aren't meant to write. They may be wired differently, with an oral fluency that doesn't translate to writing.

Moved from a printing apprenticeship to software development.

We cannot figure out what happens under the hood in Word,. "You turn the thing on, and the Clippy comes up and asks, 'What do you want to do?' "

Suggests that for people whose primary genre is speech, it's a great thing to have the computer tell you what to do.

Of classical rhetoric -- most is dead, but ethos is still viable.

Template-driven literacy. "No technical writer really writes anything from scratch." In the real world, they will be expected to work on a huge database, writing in something called "controlled English" so it can be readily translated and localized.

Noted that the documentation for pacemakers was so expensive and wasteful because doctors in the operating room didn't want to spend time reading the instructions anyway -- they would open up the pacemaker and throw away the instructions, One solution was to put the documentation on CDs. Gurak comically mimed trying to boot up a computer while in the operating room. [I couldn’t resist, and called out: "Clippy says, 'What operation do you want to do today?' " Day chipped in with, "I can't do that, Dave." ]

Gurak says she hasn't done much on the aesthetics of code.

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. --John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas --You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!: Why multiplayer games may be the best kind of job training. (Wired)

Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

As is always the case with a conference blogging exercise, these are my rough notes, typed as the speakers were talking, and lightly edited in my hotel room at the end of the day.

Matthew S. S. Johnson, Indiana University, Bloomington: “Communities in Playspace: Writing and Democracy in Online Communities.”

(I arrived a bit late… I’m going to ask Johnson to send me a copy of his paper so I can do it justice. He says that in the part I missed, he mostly went over composition theory, which is sort of presumed to be a priori knowledge at this conference, though there is only so much of the literary theory in which I was trained that translates into the world of rhetcomp. Thus, I wouldn't mind seeing what Johnson sees is important for laying the groundwork for the use of video game culture in the writing classroom. But since I heard him speak last night and went to dinner with him afterwards, I think I can piece it together reasonably well.)

Johnson was discussing the unique design model of Seed. Developers aren’t stopping their work once the game is released. They will continue to develop the game based on the decisions made by the players. The more players choose a certain mode of interaction (in this game, which has no single conclusion), the more likely the developers will go in that direction.

Johnson also noted the fact that the developers of “Oblivion” courted and encouraged fans to give suggestions for where the previous incarnations of The Elder Scrolls fell short.

Many developers are providing web kits that permit players to make fan sites easily. Gaming corporations do this to garner interest in the games, and even maintain some sense of control over those websites. But the consumers produce fan fiction and other related texts that enhance and build upon the gaming experience. That mass of fan-produced writing does influence the designers as they create the next iteration of the product.

Programmers stand by waiting to see what players will do, and the player actions (in the game and in the writing they do about the game) forms a feedback loop.

Gaming communities create openings that are potential merger points for compositions.


Erin Smith, Michigan Technological University. “Semiotic Domains Reloaded: Literacy and Localization in Video Games.”

An excerpt from a longer work in a publcation edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Havisher, with chapters co-written by scholars and gamers. Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language and Learning presents literacy as a social practice. We need different literacies to function in different semiotic domains. Video games, for Gee, are marked with certain characteristics, shaped by the internal and external design grammar. Within the game world, learners test their cognitive models. Video games provide an environment that can foster active learning.

The game industry provides an extraordinary example of Jameson’s claims about global communication forces. Exemplifies the logic, strategies, and contradictions of a force striving to balance global reach and local appeal. To what extent can we lay claim to cultural information in the world of the game, without considering broader contexts. Sony coined “global localism” rather than forcing local cultures to adapt to global culture. Can range from making sure you have the local slang right, to completely re-writing the narrative. Microsoft has a “geopolitical product strategy team” that pays attention to cultural factors that affect the way their products might be received.

Game developers design game from the outside, with localization in mind. Plot lines that would require too much revision to be localized in other cultures, may be scrapped, or only released locally.

Gee: cultural models are images, storylines, or metaphor that we recognize as “normal.” They remain invisible to us unless we are challenged. For instance, most military games penalize players for killing civilians, but in a game whose name I didn’t catch, settlers are considered combatants, and may be shot without penalty.

Quoted a scholar (the name sounded like “EE woo BOO key”) who notes that Japanese electronic products don’t carry a “cultural odor” that leads consumers to associate those products with Japaneseness. Schoolchildren perceive Japan as “cool” because it created Pokemon, but Japanese computer games and other characters don’t look Japanese. There’s a term for the non-Japaneseness of these characters. (Smith didn’t spell it, so I won’t even try to reproduce it here.)

Referred to a student, Eve, who wrote to the author of David Freedman, Creating Emotions in Games, to challenge his reading of Final Fantasy X. “You stray so far from the reality of the game that it makes me wonder whether you were playing it blindfolded with earplugs.” Eve has a “culturally aware” position, quotes from details in the gameplay in order to defend her critique of Freedman.

Differences in the Japanese voice acting and the American voice acting. The original team’s work on the Japanese game “could have been blown to hell” by a bad translation or a radically different voice interpretation.

If we’re going to start bringing games into the classroom, contextualize them, and it will serve our literacy goals more fully if we do.

During the Q & A, an audience member asked about the idea that the Japanese are using their electronic products to represent themselves culturally as westernized, that therefore their products do have a “cultural odor.”


Alice Robinson, University of Wisconsin Madison. “Videogame Design as a Writing Process.”

Works with Jim Gee. Robinson’s goal is to determine designer intent. Do designers intend the active critical learning results that researchers note when they study gamers?

Gunther Kress, “Design shapes the future through production.” Design is a cognitively higher activity than critique, which looks backward at a text.

As a linguist, Gee looks at rule systems. The “internal design grammar” is a “complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways.” You have to go beyond the internal design grammar if you ever want to get good at the game, and reach for the external design grammar. Players become readers of the IRD, but also a writer, since nothing happens unless you do something first. Players are demanding a lot more from game designers, demanding more from their interactive experiences with games as texts. Genre molding, mixing genres is part of the future of games.

Robinson repeated the designer/player, writer/reader, teacher/student slide that was a central part of her SIG presentation last night. Her research focus separates designers from marketers, artists, sound engineers, etc.

Quotes from one designer shows he is thinking very clearly about what people say, in a social environment, about the games they played. I think the audience responded meaningfully when Robinson invited us to imagine what our own authorship process would be like if we thought first and foremost about what our readers will say to each other. Paraphrasing the designer’s goal, Robinson said, “I want students [probably Robinson’s Freudian slip for “players” … speaking energetically from notes, she actually made this substitution several times] to have memories about playing my games, and I design my game to create those memories.”

The designer is not creating individual activities, but rather the environment. Killing a dragon is an isolated task, much like doing a worksheet. The task itself is part of a larger problem-solving effort. Designers want players to outsmart them.

[I like how Robinson moves back and forth between the designer/player relationship and the teacher/student relationship. I wonder if “problem solver” makes sense.]

If the end statement is “I can’t believe you can set everything on fire!” that means something different from putting a flamethrower in the game. In curriculum design, starting with “I want students to write a research paper” is akin to putting a flamethrower in a game.

In response to my question about the function of pedagogy in game design, she admitted that she is focusing on “the most progressive designers,” whose games are instantiations of the new literacy studies theories.


During the Q & A, Cynthia Selfe expressed concern that English teachers are “going to muck it up.” She thought about that phrase, and came up with instead the delightfully oxymoronic notion that we will "muck it up" because we, as English teachers, “tidy up” the genres that we pull into the classroom. She encouraged us to think about this genre as the students’ space, and encouraged us to respect this genre and learn from the students.

Johnson noted that he’s very careful about writing about the gaming communities that he doesn’t participate in, so that he doesn’t “take the data” that belongs to the game world.

Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish? (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Lila Harper, Central Washington University, Ellensburg. “What Can We Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses?”

Is often asked, “Why in the world are you reading so many of these theses?” For the past 3-4 years, she has read, copy-edited and checked the references of every completed MA thesis. Not normally on the grad committee, nor directing student research. With the help of a half-time assistant, she checks theses for correctness. About 50-60 theses a year. Also teaches in composition, has cross-disciplinary experience.

Initially assumed that plagiarism would not be a problem. Found a student’s thesis that included an unexplained acronym, and when searching to see whether it should be spelled out, she found the student had plagiarized several pages from someone else’s website. While communicating expectations about plagiarism is very important for foreign students, she finds problems across cultures. Graduate students often fail to clarify indirect or secondary citations. (Some faculty argued that there is no need to differentiate between direct and indirect citations.) Some students assume that one only needs quotation marks when the student quotes the entire sentence. She notes that some of this confusion is tied to the kind of style manual the student refers to. Plagiarism at the MA level is particularly troubling, since students are no longer considered outsiders who are being asked to write in the discourse mode of the insiders. By completing an master’s thesis, the student is demonstrating membership in that scholarly community.

She focuses not on the theft of knowledge, but on the value of transparency and accuracy that is threatened when full citations are considered a last-minute formality. Poor citations damage reproducibility. She noted that faculty members in the humanities often assume that handbooks from other disciplines do a good job teaching the rules surrounding citation. She found that style manuals were prescriptive (direct, emphatic guidance – thou shalt do this, focused towards researchers), permissive (which emphasizes options; Chicago Style Manual is much more optional that MLA – these are focused towards editors, describing general practices in particular journals); descriptive (in the sciences, where students are given different examples and presumably left to their own devices).

She showed examples from the MLA Style Book and Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, in which Hacker was more strict than the MLA. While she had to cut considerably from a longer article, she concluded with a list of practical guidelines. Her final statement was the suggestion that introductory textbooks use the citation style that students will be expected to demonstrate.


Joel Bloch, The Ohio State University, “Blogging about Plagiarism: Dealing with the Problems of Generation 1.5 Students in an Academic Classroom.”

Bloch began by referring to his earlier work, in which he argued for the abolishment of the criminal metaphor for plagiarism, and instead suggests a games metaphor, in which there are rules that have consequences, and the rules must be discovered through active efforts. He focuses on immigrants who came to America during their school years. He described a course that is “all plagiarism, all the time.” He describes the plight of ESL students strangled by the 5-paragraph essay they were forced to write in high school. The metaphor “we stand on the shoulder of giants” reminds us that literacy is important in learning new information. The organizational patterns of academic writing force student to make abstractions. Vernacular literature achieves cohesiveness with “and,” but academic literacies require writers to show a wider variety of connections, and to make those connections more explicit. A writing sample showed a combination of “and” and more complex linkages (I didn’t catch the technical term he used to describe those connections).

I was fascinated by his discussion of how the military leadership of Somali positioned a literacy program as a weapon against foreign influences, but I’m not typing much because I’m still waiting for the “blogging” part of the talk. I’m not quite sure what to make of his references to the movie Girl, Interrupted, which seemed unnecessary. (Of course, maybe I missed something, since I'm multitasking, listening and writing at the same time. I'm not just taking notes, I'm composing complete sentences and correcting typos, so perhaps I missed something because my attention is divided.)

He uses blogging as a way to give students the opportunity to develop their ideas in the classic process-oriented classroom, but also a way they can express themselves using the vernacular. He also has students cite each other (a strategy I also use for informal class discussions). He asked students to blog about their personal lives, with the understanding that whatever they write can be read by anyone. He compared the work ethic and family importance of the blogs his generation 1.5 students write, the social blogs written by students who attend his daughter’s “wealthy” private school. [But those girls are not writing for academic credit. Certainly the generation 1.5 students have a cultural perspective that may distance themselves from the boys/friends/pop culture topics one expects to find in an adolescent girls’ weblog community, but I’m sure that when those girls become college women writing for their professors, they will change the topics they write about for class.]

Students either worked so closely with primary texts that they plagiarized, or they moved so far away from them so quickly that they barely mentioned them. (He also asks students to blog responses to an article before contributing a more formal reflection.)

Indicated that building a whole course around plagiarism was designed to let students write from a position of expertise. Presented an example in which a West African student drifted away from the text completely, contrasted with Asian students who stuck very closely to the text.

“By using blogs as a form of continuous online discussion,” it was hoped students would use them “any way they wished.” The study focused on a single student, so he was cautious about conclusions.


Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. “Beyond Twentieth-Century Paradigms for Scholarly Publishing.”

Palmquist says the scholarly publishing crisis is “overblown.” In fact, there is so much demand for scholarly works, there isn’t enough capacity to meet it. [There was a bit of a buzz in the audience at that, but we resolved to save our questions until he’s finished. He says there are more books being published now than ever before, but of course they’re expensive, small runs.]

Noted that a small press can be put out of business if it misjudges the market for the book. “Academic publishing is essentially a barter system. We do the work, they take the risks… it works out pretty well.”

Notes that the acquisitions editors may only have MAs, which calls the system into question. A really successful book has 3000 copies. Printing and distribution technologies require 9-14 months, so books are already out of date when they hit the shelves.

Sympathy for junior colleagues in the humanities, where books are so central to the faculty evaluation process.

Argues for adopting a digital publishing model that enhances, rather than replaces, the traditional model. No change at the initial analysis (is the idea good), but drop the market analysis, replacing it instead with a faculty analysis. If it’s a good book that only 400 people would be interested in, a digital publication model can do a better job. Instead of in-house publishers doing all the editing of a book, shift that responsibility to the editors of series. Shift the copyediting to faculty, in collaboration with students. Cut down the publication time to as little as a month. “I’ve actually done it in a week.”

Estimated 10-20 thousand people see a very successful book.

He proposes a model of publishing a free digital web version, and also a print-on-demand version. Example – wac.collegestate.edu “Writing Selves and Writing Societies.” A PDF of the entire book downloaded 21,000 times. 67,000 visits to the site, 31,000 unique individuals.

“Legitimacy should be a reflection of the strength of the editorial review board.” Says there’s a fundamental flaw in the system if commercial viability is such an important part of the publications winnowing process.

Benefits of a distributed, collaborative publication mode.

1. Reduces distributed costs.
   
2. Authors retain copyright.
   
3. Supports publication of work that would not be commercially viable.
   
4. Ensures scholarly merit is the most important factor.
   
5. Reduces amount of time to get work out there.
   
6. Increases access to published work.
   
7. Ensures that the work is easily accessible for longer periods of time.

Mike Edwards (sitting next to me as I type) asked the speakers whether they had any concerns about people blogging their presentations. Harper said she hadn’t had much experience with conference bogging. Bloch said he blogged last year, so he’d be hypocritical if he complained. Palimquist said it depends on what the bloggers are writing. [I joked, “Oh, I’m slamming you completely!” and he said “Then I’ll come after your website!”]

Another audience member noted that the elite quality of opera is what gives it its cultural cache. Palimquist noted that Stuart Moluthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s earlier promises that everyone will be a publisher is a bit misleading, since “I don’t have time” to be my own publisher.

Palimquist ended with an invitation to anyone who has an idea for a good book to send it to him.

Based on Shatner's book "I'm Working on That," in which he explored the connections between "Star Trek" technology and real science, "How William Shatner Changed the World" takes the tongue-in-cheek approach the actor often applies to what he considers the over-serious fandom of the TV shows and movies. --'Star Trek' inspired real inventions (AP | The Cincinnati Post)

I've always got time for some Shatnology. Shatnolotry?

Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

The wireless internet access at the Palmer House Hilton charges an hourly rate, so I’ll batch-post my notes to my blog when I get back to my hotel. As is always the case with live blogging (or near-live blogging), these will be rough notes that I took during the speaker’s presentations. These notes will be colored by my own subjective opinions of what is blogworthy.

Looking through the program for this year’s 4Cs in Chicago, I’m annoyed to see that Clancy Ratliff’s talk on “Coalition-Building on Weblogs” and Stephen Krause’s talk on “Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections” are scheduled at the same time.

But I won’t be going to either of them, because instead I’m going to “Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies.”

Not only have these three sessions been scheduled at the same time, they’re listed one after the other in the program.

But wait – that’s not all. At the same time there’s a “Computer Connection” session on “Usability and Remediation,” and the same session also includes, “Leeroy Jenkins! Gaming and Visual Argumentation.”

Leeroy Jenkins is a character in a machinima video taken from within the MMO World of Warcraft. The video shows an over-eager gamer completely ruin the meticulous plans that his guild formulates while he was not paying attention. It’s pretty clear to me that the whole thing was staged, but it’s still hysterical.

Here in the lobby of the Hilton, people are gathering in small groups, looking through the conference program. We’re managing our resources, planning our strategy, and networking.

But I don’t want to have to plan. I don’t want to have to choose. At least, not at 3:15 on Thursday, when, in order to bring home all the treasure I really want, I’d have to run around checking out four different sessions at the same time, waving my PDA stylus and threatening everyone with my digital camera, firing off questions, perhaps screaming like Leeroy Jenkins himself.

Oh, well. At least I have chicken.

They're meant to educate people by simulating real-world events and are often created with the best of intentions. Problem is, education, science and health care aren't exactly the stuff of exciting entertainment, let alone video games. --Daniel Terdiman --What's wrong with serious games? (C|Net News.com)

Okay, but I'm uncomfortable with the word "entertanment," since that carries the idea that the entertainer is doing the work, and the entertained just sits there. Sitting in front of a TV may require mental work to connect the dots in the plot and understadnd the jokes, but a game that involved doing nothing but watching a plot unfold would be boring. I'm not implying that Terdiman doesn' t know what a game is. It's just the choice of the word "entertaining" grates on me.

Finally Upgrading to MoveableType 3.2 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've had a rather hellacious weekend. I upgraded the MovableType installation at blogs.setonhill.edu to version 3.2 on Friday.

The actual upgrade went very smoothly, but it took most of the afternoon for me to get the anti-spam protection to work decently.

The spam-blocker I had been using, MT-Blacklist, did just what I said -- it blocked unwanted spam. But the built-in spam filter in MT 3.2 simply marks the spam as "Published, "Unpublished" (awaiting moderation), or "Junk." But there's no easy way for me to print out the last 10 "Published" comments that have been added to the system.

If you ask the system to give you a list of the n most recent entries that have been commented on, that list does not exclude the "junk" comments. The end result is that list is pretty much useless, because we're getting hundreds of junk comments for every legitimate comment. The system works pretty well from the perspective of the individual blogger, but at the moment the upgrade has killed the "Recently Commented" feature of our blogs.setonhill.edu portal.

Well, not actually dead... but it takes so much time to wade through thousands of comments each time I want to update the main page, that I fear it will make people think the main page has frozen. I'm sure there's some way to do solve this problem, but as much as I like that "Recent Comments" feature, it's not crucial.

When I get some more time, I'll submit an MT support ticket.

Far more frustrating was the realization that my curricular websites are broken. I finally tracked down the problem... in the past, it was apparently acceptable to use the MTEntryDate template tag in an archive template. Thus, when I wanted to print the date of an entry that appears in a list of all the entries that appeared in a certain month or on a certain day, I used MTEntryDate. A little time with Google revealed that MT 3.2 now requires me to use MTArchiveDate in those archive contexts. This took me several hours of work to recover.

My parents are in town this weekend, so fortunately I've had help with the kids, and I've been able to throw a lot of time into this problem. I even managed to get away with the family to a Slovenian dance hall for some polka dancing.

But on top of all this, I've spent even more hours this weekend working on two projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure.

One is a chapter on Adventure that I promised to submit to a collection of essays being published in honor of a former mentor of mine. I would have sworn that I sent in a rough draft of that essay weeks ago, but I got a very polite, very urgent letter asking me to please, please, pretty please submit something as soon as possible.

The other project had been on the back burner since classes started in the fall. Last summer I went to the real Colossal Cave, and while I wrote up some of those experiences in an article I submitted last fall to a forthcoming book on ecocriticism and videogames ("Playing with Mother Nature"), I have also wanted to publish some material online in venue that is readily accessible to online researchers. A few days ago, I learned that Will Crowther and Don Woods (creators of Colossal Cave Adventure) will be honored at the Game Developers Conference this week. Sadly, I haven't been able to update my curricular website since January, so I won't be able to update my own Adventure resources by then, but I figured this is a good time to start getting my notes together, just in case I encounter something in the press coverage that needs correction.

The 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards will devote a portion of the ceremony to honoring a group of individuals whose efforts stand out in the advancement of the interactive entertainment industry. The ceremony, which is produced and hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and presented by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), will take place on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at the San Jose Civic Auditorium.

Will Crowther and Don Woods, creators of the text-based game Adventure, will receive the First Penguin award for leading the path to unchartered grounds by creating the first text-based Role Playing Game (RPG). --6th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

There never has been a better time to get into Web journalism. We are making money, we are hiring, and we are actively searching for new, innovative ideas. After ten years, there are no veterans in this field. This is your chance to be among the first. --Anthony Moor --Go to the Web, young journalist! (Online Journalism Review)

Singer says he plans to use the late Marlon Brando in the new film. Brando, who played Superman's father, Jor-El, in the 1978 Superman and died in 2004, will return in the same role.

Singer says he found stock footage of Brando shot by director Richard Donner in 1978, which will provide Brando's voice. Special-effects crews will digitally re-create Brando's image, Singer says. --'Superman' torch is passed (Yahoo!)

Stella! I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse! This is no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination. The horror! The horror! I coulda been a contender!

Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story.

But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you find your man vs. machine story relying on a human-edited source or from an algorithm? --Ryan Singel --Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War (Wired)

The opening to this article is more creative than the body, but it's still a useful overview.

Thanks to a comment a former student added to last week's post, I found some pleasant, lush models of trees, along with numerous other realistic residential items. I've added the fluorescent light fixtures and wall sconces inside, and some pretty trees outside. I also started working with a street model (curbs and sidewalks), but ran into some file-name snags. Nothing major -- I just didn't feel like doing a lot of renaming manually. (There's got to be a way to batch process this kind of thing.)

Since this past week was Spring Break, my wife scheduled a lot of family activities. I still got to the office three days during the week, but much of that time was taken up with writing a letter of recommendation for one student, helping a different student apply for funds, and working on a new website for one of the campus units. I enjoy doing that stuff -- it's the kind of thing that gets squeezed out of a typical day during a typical week. I wouldn't exaclty say I enjoyed looking over 10 folders from applicants who don't meet our SAT admissions requrements, but it is important work that I take seriously; we actually have 20 folders to look at by Tuesday, but I wanted to get a head start on the stack. In addition, the pending release of an update to the interactive fiction programming language Inform has gotten me to pay more than the usual amount of attention to the world of contemporary text-adventure gaming.

So I haven't fired up Hammer (the Half-Life 2 world-building tool) for several days.

I have laid the groundwork for some future accomplishments. I had to leave my work computer on overnight, but it finally downloaded Steam. I confess I didn't get much modding done, since I took the opportunity to replay the beginning of Half-Life 2, marvelling at the graphics (which look great on the screen of my tiny Dell 700m laptop, but which look even better on my more powerful work computer). But theoretically, now I can test out the FacePoser (which crashes when I try it at home).

I also asked my university for the funds to buy a few copies of XSI, a powerful 3D model tool. For the purposes I have in mind, each student won't need an individual copy. In a note I wrote to my dean, I likened XSI to a kiln, and noted that when I did a ceramics project in the third grade, I didn't need my own kiln. I molded my clay and gave it to my teacher to bake. Later, I put on the glaze, and she baked it again. Okay, that metaphor sort of messes up the whole Steam/Hammer/Forge thing that Valve Software has going, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I also let our networking folks know about my desire to teach with Steam this fall. I'll need to find out what computer lab I'm going to have to use, so I can book it now.

Also in the "planning ahead" category, I've got to put together a syllabus for a games programming course that a nearby college has asked me to teach online.

From my server logs, I've noticed that my modding diary is starting to attract hits from search engines. I can't imagine that I'd be of much help right now, but I plan to keep chronicling my progress, so that people who are even greener newbies than I am might learn a thing or two, and people who've been so kind to post helpful online tutorials can bask in the link love I shall bestow upon them.

Next on my modding to-do list: Probably working a little more on the lighting, adding a working light switch and some exterior light fixtures. Maybe some grass, too. I'd also like to figure out how to get bright sunlight to come down from the sky -- right now the only light comes from artificial sources I've placed around my model.

I don't know that I'll get to it in the coming week, but I'm eager to figure out how to get my NPCs to respond to my actions. I'd also like to record some original dialog and get an in-game NPC to speak it.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 3 -- Trees, Wall Sconces, Ceiling Fixtures (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"We also wanted your cubicle to give you a little shred of dignity and recognition and acknowledge you exist because you're probably not getting that from your co-workers or your boss. So we've built in a mechanical flower that's acoustically activated. When you're gone, it's wilted. But when you come in, it's acoustically activated and pops up to attention, might even shudder a little bit with happiness.

"Even your wastebasket will kind of vibrate with happiness when trash is thrown into it. So you want the cubicle to love you and care for you, kind of a womb experience." --Scott Adams --Scott Adams: Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle (CNN)

From 2001. Still pretty amusing.

The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. --Julie Schlosser --Cubicles: The Great Mistake (CNN Money.com)

The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers. --Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies (The Onion (Satire))

In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade 'Just Fun' in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. --Daniel P. Hower --Classic Arcade Sounds: Hear for Yourself (CoinOpVideoGames.com)

Visuals, schmizuals! We don't need no steenkin visuals! Thanks to Mike Sichok for pointing out this little piece of heaven. Mike writes,

I love that you can also hear adjacent games in the background.. such as if you pick "Zaxxon," you can also hear "Berzerk" and "Frogger" being played nearby. I forgot how ear shattering loud games were back then.. I remember a ton of bass, such as in "Tron," and "Asteroids," but geez. Hardcore.... kill the lights, turn on the blacklights, and turn this up.. I am in vintage bliss.

The first fully-automated performance of the 1924 Futurist/Dadaist/Cubist composition "Ballet mécanique" by George Antheil takes place this weekend in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall in Washington, DC--in conjunction with the larges exhibit in history on Dadaist art.

Programmed by composer/author/music technologist Paul Lehrman, and using robots built by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) under the direction of Eric Singer, this will be the culmination of eight years of work bringing Antheil's almost-forgotten work-for xylophones, bass drums, electric bells, siren, airplane propellors, and 16 player pianos-back to life. And it will be LOUD.

Featuring computer-driven player pianos by Gulbransen, and software from Mark of the Unicorn running on a Macintosh G5 computer, the installation will reside on the Mezzanine of the Gallery through March 29, playing a ten-minute version of the Ballet mécanique at 1:00 pm every day, and additionally at 4:00 pm Monday-Friday.
The grand opening of the Ballet mécanique installation will take place at 1:00 pm on Sunday, March 12. JUST ANNOUNCED is a special PRESS EVENT at 4:00 pm on Saturday, March 11, when the piece will be previewed to CBS News, PBS, and other news organizations. The public IS INVITED!

More information about the Ballet mécanique can be found at http://antheil.org. LEMUR's website is http://lemurbots.org. The National Gallery of Art is at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue. Admission is always FREE. Their website is http://www.nga.gov.

In other exciting news, BAD BOY MADE GOOD, the documentary film by Paul Lehrman and Ron Frank about George Antheil and the Ballet mécanique, will have its broadcast premiere on WETA-TV Channel 26, Washington's PBS station, on Sunday, April 9th at 3:00 pm. Dates for other broadcasts will be announced soon.Bad Boy Made Good (http://antheil.org)

I just got this e-mail. I wish I could see this! Someone in the DC area, please go to this and let me know what it's like!

If you think steam punk is cool, it looks wimpy next to Ballet Mechaniqe, which was punked out on steam long before steam punk became retro.

My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I've made some good progress.

Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I'd been going crazy because I had turned off "helpers," which means that I couldn't see the blue sphere that all the tutorials mentioned was supposed to mark the site of the hinge.

Half-Life 2 is set in a grungy urban dystopia, so the image files that depict stock materials (wood panels, plaster ceilings, brick walls) all look pitted and rough. While I don't want to spend forever fiddling with images, I began to realize last week that the image files really aren't just window dressing. The availability of appropriate images really does affect what items I choose to work on.

I found a few texture packs that expand the number of materials available to Hammer (the 3D world tool I'm using), but I was having trouble following a tutorial to load just one custom texture. The comments at the end of the tutorial indicate that I'm not the only one suffering from similar problems. After several hours and several tries, I finally figured out where the custom textures should go, and how to find them within the 3D editor when I wanted to use them. (Those textures came in an "rar" archive. While I already had a tool that was supposed to deal with "rar" files, when I decompressed the file the target folder was always empty. So I had to upgrade to the 30-day trial version of Power Archiver. When that runs out, I'll have to take a look at open-source archiving tools.

With that under my belt, I downloaded a pack of hundreds of new textures, including the tile floor, panel walls, and wood beam that you can see in the image. In this model, I added a ceiling, though now the lights are just emanating from nowhere. I'll have to create some light fixtures.

The tree visible outside the window comes with Half-Life 2, and I guessed correctly that it was possible to change its "skin" to add a few leaves. Not many. I'll have to keep looking if I want to use some healthy trees.

I took the gun away from the NPC Alyx, so now she's a little less aggressive. I'm not sure how to adjust her behavior, but at least she fits in slightly better in the realistic office setting I'm trying to create.

The wood panel walls are actually too fancy for the generic office settings, but I do want to create a courtroom at some point, so I don't mind experimenting with this design scheme.

The next big "proof of concept" for me is to import models of ready-made furniture. The desk visible in the photo comes with the game. I've seen textures that I can apply to simple cubes in order to get bookcases, file cabinets, bulletin boards, and the like. While I love adventure games, with secret panels containing keys that unlock more secret panels, the mod I'm working will need few functioning props (other than doors). Still, I've seen ready-made models of computer desks, TV sets, kitchen appliances, and even a collection of SWAT vehicles (that might be very useful for the police station that I hope will be in the mod).

I had to hack the URL at Wadfather in order to get past the ridiculously complex navigational system. (The link goes directly to the "Real World" textures I'll need.)

"He'd tell us, 'Now, 20 rows down, the accounting's hard as granite?it's the hardest thing an office man can stand,'" said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters' former trainees, "'but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It's the life of a numbers-crunchin' man.'"

Sources say Peters, who was born to poor temp workers in eastern Virginia, would often go to offices where his mother worked and sit on her knee. According to his family, he once took up her pencil and said, "Pencil be the death of me. Oh, Mommy, this pencil be the death of me." --Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0 (The Onion (Satire))

Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

"The Excel spreadsheet started off to working, with its hourglass running hard there on the screen," Broonzy said. "But old Wally Peters had his pencil filling columns, throwing graphite off like locomotive steam."

By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia's latest information on the storm and recovery efforts (or lack thereof). They don't get a months-old dispatch with no clear link to the latest news.

What if a news organization, employing professional journalists, wrote their news website like a wiki? I'm not taking about turning over the page to readers. I'm suggesting that -- instead of distinct daily takes -- news stories could be covered with encyclopedia-style articles that staffers would update with new information whenever available. How many more inbound links would such an approach get? --Robert Niles --Search and you will find ... an old news story? (OJR)

This is an excellent introduction to an issue that's bothered me for some time. At one point, The Onion used to publish its new articles in a root directory, and then move them to a new archive directory to make room for new stuff. Thus, if I linked to a story with the URL "news1.htm," a week later that article would be replaced by some other news story with the same name, and the content that I wanted to send my readers to would be in a different location. I could get around that problem by linking directly to the archive location in the first place, but webmasters who didn't understand why moving URLs is a bad idea also don't understand why they should bother changing the way they do things. (I once tried to explain it to the editor of a newsletter, and got a snippy response, to the effect, "Why should we bother to do this work for you?" I stopped reading, and linking to, that publication.)

Blogs essentially publish the same material so that it is visible in multiple ways. You can see this entry at the top of my blog home page as soon as I publish it; you can see it categorized along with other entries with a simliar content, and you can see it as a stand-alone page at an URL that will not change. Other blogs also sort content by day, week and/or month.

I use Wikipedia whenever I come into a story late, and I'm looking for context.