May 2006 Archive Page

Two types of participation made it more likely students would end up at elite colleges: yearbook or school newspapers and "hobby clubs." (The authors regretted that there was no breakdown on the impact of various hobbies, so it is unclear if photography clubs do better or worse than chess or other topics.)

Numerous activities had no apparent impact on whether or not students will end up in college -- elite or otherwise. School plays, interscholastic individual sports, intramurals, cheerleading, academic honor societies, public service clubs -- no impact is clear from any of them.

What does all of this mean? The authors say that their research suggests that extracurricular activities do matter, but perhaps not just to be piled one on top of another for the longest possible list. One possibility the authors suggest is that this data may reflect the relevance of the theory of "cultural capital," a term coined by Pierre Bourdieu, the late French sociologist. --What Really Counts in Getting In (Inside Higher Ed)

This finding suggests that not only do students underuse formal office hours, but that the very presence of such a schedule inhibits them from seeking out the instructor at other times as well. This finding has important implications for college-level instructors everywhere, depending on their goals. Instructors wishing to minimize contact with students should schedule formal office hours, whereas instructors wishing to maximize such contact should not hold formal office hours. --"Angry Professor" --Student Consumption of Faculty Effort in Formal and Informal Contexts  (A Gentleman's C: The World Needs Ditch-Diggers, Too)

This is, of course, satirical and exaggerated, and it's written by a professor who teaches large classes at a large state institution.

I generally leave my door open because chatting with students is a great way to procrastinate.

I do have several stages of signaling "leave me alone." I might just close the door; I might close the door and turn off my light (though I know the silhouette of me seated before the computer screen will be visible through the frosted glass); I might put a little sign that says "I'm Grading" on my door (with a smaller note noting that I will check my e-mail before going home for the day); or I might pack up and find a quiet corner of the library.

With their mouths largely shut but their laptops and flip phones open, teenagers' bedrooms are beginning to sound like the library.

So is the dinner table. On her show May 10, Ellen DeGeneres ribbed guest Lindsay Lohan: "Every time I've seen you, you're out with eight or nine girls, having dinner. You're all sitting around the table on your BlackBerries." Lohan matter-of-factly explained that she had "like 1,000" messages to answer.

Not long ago, prattling away on the phone was as much a teenage rite as hanging out at the mall. Flopped on the bed, you yakked into your pink or football-shaped receiver until your parents hollered at you to get off.

Now, Sidekicks and iBooks are as prized as Mom's Princess phone, and conversations, the oral kind, are as uncomfortable as braces. Which makes employers and communications experts anxious: This generation may be technologically savvier than their bosses, but will they be able to have a professional discussion? --Olivia Barker --Technology leaves teens speechless (USA Today)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

The Nintendo Amusement Park is a first attempt at making a life-size re-creation of Super Mario Bros. Players strap into a powered bungee system that lets them jump 12 feet in the air, collect coins and snag magic mushrooms. It's hoped it will eventually be expanded into a full Mario Bros.-style obstacle course. --Nintendo Amusement Park (Wired Blog)

The photos look like informal snapshots, but the idea is clever. Sure looks like fun.

Each scenario offers a simple Sim-City style visual depiction of its urban center that allows you to plan tactics and assess trends, but everyday events are usually planned and occur within the game's menus, charts, and lists. Some scenarios offer maps that depict infrastructure, agricultural, or natural resources that can be targeted. There's a ton of information to process, and despite readily available color-coded charts and descriptions of individual, group, and community stats, it's often quite difficult to see the big picture. This is remedied in part with simple system that allows the player to poll all the movement's leaders prior to scheduling any tactic, and consider their input. Their advice isn't foolproof, but for the most part, they'll steer you in the right direction.

AFMP isn't a pipe dream of a game that rewards shallow idealism or encourages martyrdom. Instead, it challenges you to apply resources thoughtfully, reasonably, and realistically. It wisely avoids hot-button political topics, instead focusing on basic civil rights. The only overt bias it demonstrates is a built-in intolerance for violent action. In every case, nonviolent tactics are always more successful. Fortunately, this never really seems like a contrivance, because each scenario is thoughtfully crafted to portray a situation in which nonviolence seems like an appropriate path. -- Adam "The Fly" LaMosca --A Force More Powerful [Review] (Gamers with Jobs)

This fall, I'm going to ask my "New Media Projects" students to create a new media object designed to teach a social or moral principle. (That's just the midterm project... they'll be welcome to create ars gratia artis, or ludus gratia ludorum, for their term project.)

This would be a good game to use when we examine what form such a game might take.

Ahmadinejad: Why must the German people be humiliated today because a group of people committed crimes in the name of the Germans during the course of history?

SPIEGEL: The German people today can't do anything about it. But there is a sort of collective shame for those deeds done in the German name by our fathers or grandfathers.

Ahmadinejad: How can a person who wasn't even alive at the time be held legally responsible?

SPIEGEL: Not legally but morally.

Ahmadinejad: Why is such a burden heaped on the German people? The German people of today bear no guilt. Why are the German people not permitted the right to defend themselves? Why are the crimes of one group emphasized so greatly, instead of highlighting the great German cultural heritage? Why should the Germans not have the right to express their opinion freely?

SPIEGEL: Mr. President, we are well aware that German history is not made up of only the 12 years of the Third Reich. Nevertheless, we have to accept that horrible crimes have been committed in the German name. We also own up to this, and it is a great achievement of the Germans in post-war history that they have grappled critically with their past.

Ahmadinejad: Are you also prepared to tell that to the German people?

SPIEGEL: Oh yes, we do that. --''We Are Determined'' (Spiegel)

A chilling interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, conducted by the German publication Der Spiegal.

Note how the interview started with some gentle questions about socce, but moves quickly into German reaction to Ahmadinejad's questions about the Holocaust.

A California appeals court has smacked down Apple's legal assault on bloggers and their sources, finding that the company's efforts to subpoena e-mail received by the publishers of Apple Insider and PowerPage.org runs contrary to federal law, California's reporter's shield law, and the state Constitution.

Apple had also claimed that the inside information "could have been obtained only through a breach of an Apple confidentiality agreement." The company argued that even if the bloggers were journalists, there's no protection for anonymous sources who have committed the crime of trade secret theft. --Apple Loses Bid to Unmask Bloggers' Sources (Wired Blogs 27B Stroke 6)

This is good news for bloggers, since Apple's case hinged on the claim that bloggers aren't really journalists, and thus aren't entitled to the legal protections that enable journalists to carry out their jobs.

While duscussing This Blog Will Self Destruct, Will has wondered about professors who get special treatment that employees outside the academy don't get, while Eric has reported frustration that an employee who doesn't enjoy that kind of protection risks losing his or her job if the boss doesn't like what the employee posts in a lifestyle blog.

Here's another instance of a class of writers with special rights.

Apple can't just fire these bloggers, because in this case Apple was complaining about news that appeared on websites that cover Apple products. If this were a case of Apple employees writing about Apple, even if they were doing it on their own time, Apple would have been able to discipline them.

Cartoons abstract from real life in much the same way philosophers do. Homer is not realistic in the way a film or novel character is, but he is recognisable as a kind of American Everyman. His reality is the reality of an abstraction from real life that captures its essence, not as a real particular human who we see ourselves reflected in.

The satirical cartoon world is essentially a philosophical one because to work it needs to reflect reality accurately by abstracting it, distilling it and then presenting it back to us, illuminating it more brightly than realist fiction can. --Julian Baggini --The Simpsons as philosophy (BBC)

I was particularly amused by this comment, appended to the story by a reader who differs with one of Baggini's major points:

Far from being "simple philosophical truths", his quips are "tempting excuses for inaction". So perhaps the Simpsons' main gift is to be vague enough to read whatever you like into it.

I haven't watched an episode in years. When I used to teach technical writing to students who were in the middle of technical courses where they were expected to absorb and internalize a huge amount of special jargon, and often thought that a technical writing assignment was their chance to impress me with how much technical jargon they could use.

I told them to write for Homer "Where's the ANY key?" Simpson.

Back in the 1980's, when I attended high school, reading someone's diary would have been the ultimate intrusion. But communication was rudimentary back then. There were no cellphones, or answering machines; there was no ''texting,'' no MP3's or JPEG's, no digital cameras or file-sharing software; there was no World Wide Web -- none of the private-ish, public-ish, superimmediate forums kids today take for granted. If this new technology has provided a million ways to stay in touch, it has also acted as both an amplifier and a distortion device for human intimacy. The new forms of communication are madly contradictory: anonymous, but traceable; instantaneous, then saved forever (unless deleted in a snit). In such an unstable environment, it's no wonder that distinctions between healthy candor and ''too much information'' are in flux and that so many find themselves helplessly confessing, as if a generation were given a massive technological truth serum.

[..]

The general degree of anonymity varies: some bloggers post their full names, others give quirky, quasi-revelatory handles. No wonder everyone is up till 5 a.m. tweaking their font size and Photoshopping a new icon. At heart, an online journal is like a hyperflexible adolescent body -- but better, because in real life, it takes money and physical effort to add a piercing, or to switch from zip-jacketed mod to Abercrombie prepster. A LiveJournal or Blurty offers a creative outlet with a hundred moving parts. And unlike a real journal, with a blog, your friends are all around, invisible voyeurs -- at least until they chime in with a comment. --Emily Nussbaum --My So-Called Blog (New York Times)

Intersting how the author contrasts the online diary with "a real journal." I think she meant something like "unlike a paper diary." The digital versions are real.

This article, from 2004, comes just before the big MySpace/Facebook surge.

Within blogosphere studies, there is considerable disagreement as to whether the blogger's contruction of identity is a form of role-playing or an authentic attempt at mimesis. Some theorists have adopted apparently extreme positions: Raynes-Goldie, embracing postmodernism, suggests that "in this informational chaos, the question of truth is not really a useful one," whereas McNeill notes that "though these readers do not know the diarist outside of the context of her text, they believe her textual representation is 'real,' the flesh made digital" (37). Presenting a more measured view of the subject, Kitzmann writes, "that diaries and autobiographies, both handwritten and electronic, are grounded to a significant extent on real, authentic individuals is a common enough assertion." He compares the fictionalization of blog entries to a violation of Philippe Lejeune's "autobiographical pact" (59), the contract of trust formed between the reader and the writer, the autobiographical pact is based on the reader's recognition that the name of the author, narrator, and protagonist are the same, and that these three seem to share a common identity. --Daniel Holbrook --Theorizing the Diary Weblog (PDF) (Our Bold Hero)

I'm planning to beef up my knowledge of the personal diary weblog as part of my preparation for teaching Writing for the Internet, and Holbrook's paper (which he submitted for his MA thesis at the University of Chicago) covers the area nicely.

Hollbrook also has posted a useful bibliography, with some cross-reference metadata.

The JRTC has been offering this sort of training since 1993. But in the past three years, with the US embroiled in its most complex conflict since the Vietnam War, Pentagon planners have dramatically improved the simulation. The 4,000 guardsmen here for these late-winter exercises will encounter 500 soldiers from the 509th, 500 support staff, a dozen Apache and Blackhawk combat helicopters, 30 tank-like Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and 1,000 jeeps, Humvees, and sundry other things with wheels. Commanders on the ground get video feeds from simulated surveillance planes flown over 3-D maps of the battlefield. In-game journalists produce three daily newspapers, a radio show, and a nightly reel of video highlights. More than 200 of the role-players are Arab Americans, many of them Iraqis, bussed in from around the US for extra realism. A three-week exercise can cost up to $9 million. --Vince Beiser --Baghdad, USA (Wired)

This article describes a massive U.S. military role-playing operation. Not a computer game, but rather a meatspace training exercise.

I love the detail about the in-game media coverage. I wonder where they recruit the journalists to produce the three newspapers and the radio show?

Technological advances in everything from product design software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals. Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn't always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It's not outsourcing; it's crowdsourcing. --Jeff Howe --The Rise of Crowdsourcing  (Wired)

The truth about snow words in the Eskimo languages simply doesn't matter. If it did, I would carefully explain that there seem to be only a handful of roots that really are snow roots in the languages of the Yup'iks and Inuits, maybe four or five, not very different from the number found in English (snow, sleet, slush, blizzard). But it doesn't matter. All that matters to journalists is that they continue to have the snowbound simile in question at their disposal for constant use whenever a line or two needs to be filled up with linguistic babble.

But this is what makes the point I made about the conditional example above so clear. You are supposed to know that there are dozens of words for snow in a language called "Eskimo". (Sure, there is no such language, and you have never seen any data, but never mind, you are just supposed to know that it's true.) It's meant to be publicly known, in the common ground. --Geoffrey K. Pullum --Bleached Conditionals (Language Log)

This entry lead to the coining of a new term to describe this kind of structural duplication: snowcloning.

It's much catchier than "bleached conditionals."

Japan's top camera maker, Canon Inc., will stop developing new single-lens reflex film cameras as more people abandon film for digital, company officials said Thursday.

The Tokyo-based Canon's move followed a similar move by its closest Japanese rival, Nikon Corp., which announced earlier this year it would stop making seven of its nine film cameras and concentrate on digital models. --Canon to stop making single-lens camera (Yahoo!)

Part of me wants to say "That's a shame," but the part of me that actually bought two digital cameras for the student paper and one for myself says, "That's the way things are."

I learned how to shoot and develop black and white film for my school paper, and with various odd jobs I picked up writing press releases (and one semester, designing and painting billboards for the drama department), that skill kept me in pocket change during my undergraduate years.

For a while there, the film industry hung on there with a meme that went something like "digital photography is for information, film is for memories," but I note this change without any sense of personal loss.

Okay, as a kid I would always have a moment or two of sadness when I threw away a comfortable old pair of sneakers that I had outgrown. I am feeling that way now.


Meanwhile, can someone tell me where USB port is on this thing? (I found it while cleaning out a storage cabinet in student publications office.)

In classroom after classroom, all across the nation, students are being asked to memorize and regurgitate trivia at the expense of time spent learning what is essential in the 21st Century. As one letter to the Times editors asked, "In today's information age, where a body of information in all but the narrowest of fields is beyond anyone's ability to master, why aren't colleges teaching students how to research, organize and evaluate the information that is out there?" Why, one must ask, would a journalism professor in 2006 be testing skills from the Remington typewriter and linotype era?

[...]

We need to face the facts. If I need a quick answer outside of school and can't quite remember what I need to know, I will Google the topic, or I will call someone, or text someone, or e-mail someone. One of these sources will, if I know how to operate this technology efficiently and effectively, provide me with the essential information. That's not cheating, that is life. Only in a classroom is this considered "wrong." Everywhere else it is viewed as "intelligent," because we all know that we cannot know everything. --Ira Socol --Stop Chasing High-Tech Cheaters (Inside Higher Ed)

The author makes a good point.

My wife thinks I have a poor memory because she says I forget important things. While I've never been good with names, I'm very good at finding things based on a clue or a half-remembered detail. When she sees the eight or ten overlapping windows on my tiny laptop screen, she sees chaos, but I see information.

I don't carry the facts in my head; instead, I carry the processes that I use in order to get the facts that I need.

In defense of the journalism professor who issued a spelling test, it's very true that you can't get very far if you have to look up every word. But if the assignment is designed properly, those students who do have to use their spell-checkers will take up time that will prevent them from working on some other area of the test. But a spell-check won't solve the "affect/effect" or "than/then" confusion; so that's the kind of thing that it makes sense to teach.

Another telling quote from the article: "Just three days after publishing the 'Cheating' article the Times itself had to publish a lengthy retraction of a front page story. The prominent printing of false information could have been avoided, the newspaper's Public Editor noted, had the news staff simply Googled its own articles."

And to Socol's confession, let me add that I rely heavily on Wikipedia when I first encounter new information.

Most plagiarists don't expect to get caught and, when they do, they generally go along with the demands to avoid escalation. Many will do so silently, never writing back and others will write back to apologize or make excuses. A few bold souls might even blame the infringement on a friend who gave them the work. If that happens to you, be sure to ask for the name and E-mail of the friend in question so you can contact them personally about the infringement and, if your plagiarist doesn't provide that information, don't buy the story, especially if they distinctly claimed the works to be their own. --Jonathan Bailey --Contacting a Plagiarist (Plagiarism Today)

I guess that since the "plagiarismtoday.com" domain was available, this author is stuck with the term "plagiarism." But what he's really talking about is copyright infringement. But the content on this site fills an interesting niche, in that it seems to focus on cases where one netizen pilfers the work of another. The issues I found discussed on this site involved self-published poetry and blog discussions, rather than professional content.

If I reproduce something that somebody else wrote, and I give the original author credit, it's not plagiarism, even though it may still be copyright infringement.

It's not plagiarism unless you pass off somebody else's work (e.g. words, ideas, or complex structure) as your own.

IRobot Chief Executive Colin Angle said one group of soldiers even named its robot "Scooby Doo" and grieved when it was blown up after completing 35 successful missions defusing improvised explosive devices.

"Please fix Scooby Doo because he saved my life," a soldier told repair technicians, according to Angle'saccount at last week's Future in Review technology conference. --Joel Rothstein --Soldiers bond with battlefield robots (MSNBC | Reuters)

--$100 Laptop Working Prototype Unveiled (One Laptop Per Child)

-- Bob Coyne and Richard Sproat
--WordsEye: An Automatic Text-to-Scene Conversion System (PDF)AT&T Labs -- Research)

The text in the caption is what told the computer to assemble these objects in this order. Of course, someone had to tell the computer how to draw these objects, tag each object so that the computer knows where "in" an object is and where the "face" of an object is.

Via Grand Text Auto.

Illegal or inappropriate blogging or social behavior over the Internet is now a violation of District 128's student code of conduct at both Libertyville and Vernon Hills High Schools and can lead to denial of extracurricular student privileges. --Ed Collins

--Schools crack down on inappropriate blogs (Sun Times)

According to the article, the new school code uses this language: "Maintaining or being identified on a blog site which depicts illegal or inappropriate behavior will be considered a violation of this code."

Clarity is defeated once more by a passive verb!

If Billy puts up a blog in which describes himself doing illegal or inappropriate things, and he also posts a picture of Sally reading a book in the library and says, "Sally is a good girl who never misbehaves," then according to the wording quoted above, Sally is in violation of the code. She has been identified on a blog site which depicts illegal or inappropriate behavior.

I think it's safe to assume that's not what the authors of the code intended. Overall, though, because this code does not prohibit such blogging, but rather spells out the potential consequences, this code is probably a good way to prepare students for what to expect when they head into the workplace.

This confusing passive language might be part of a well-intended hint to encourage the students to post anonymously, while at the same time warning students that if they publicize their anonymous blog, someone is likely to make their true identity public.

Thanks for the link, Matt.

In essence, it was classic libel against video games: That they encourage isolation, with each player staring glassy-eyed at the evil, hypnotic screen. The irony here, of course, is that these complaints were coming from players who themselves were spending hours staring at their own computer screens while they played Second Life. Dig it: People were complaining that a game was ruining the quality of virtual life inside a game. --Clive Thompson --The Game Within the Game (Wired)

How interesting... a game that a Second Life subscriber created in order to give people something to do while visiting the virtual world has migrated into a Game Boy Advance product. "The virtual has taken on flesh, and now thousands of kids worldwide will replicate the Second Life libel -- their parents will accuse them of staring, in isolation, at the screen, just as they did with Tetris so many years ago. History doesn't just repeat itself, apparently: It remixes like a DJ."

>look
You are on a red leather sofa facing a very large and very tempting flat-screen TV. A sheltie puppy is chewing through your shoelaces. There is a laptop in your lap. You have five Word documents open.

>look at Word documents
They are titled "Chapter 3 The Ubicomp Games", "Chapter 4 The Pervasive Games", "Nintendo Cubes section pergames", "REJECTED WRITING" and "works cited".

> work on dissertation
You spend five minutes browsing Boing Boing.

> work on dissertation
You check the Technorati links to your blog.

> work on dissertation

--Jane McGonigal --Disseration Zork (Avant Game)

An ABD fights the dissertation grues.

Early on, the visionary geeks among us at these institutes of higher education realized that these computing machines were great for games, and a whole lot more fun than a slide rule.

These side projects took on a life of their own, and resulted in the popularity of games like "Adventure" and "Colossal Cave." --Tom Leuold --Games with no pictures? Yes, they really did exist (InsideBayArea.com)

Uh... "Adventure" and "Colossal Cave" are different names for the same game, which is also known as "Colossal Cave Adventure."

Of course, the Crowther/Woods collaboration that spread on the internet begat numerous modifications, so it's entirely possible that one game that presented itself as "Colossal Cave" and another that presented itself as "Adventure" opened so differently that they might be remembered as separate games.

For fun, here's a comic in which a T-Rex talks about text adventure games.

Youth and alienated populations are inclined to spend more time going through identity development processes because they are trying to "figure out who they are." Blogs and profiles are particularly supportive of this. Of course, blogs require having something to say while profiles let you write yourself into being via collage. People do grow out of ongoing identity production, but not for quite some time. (Hell, i still haven't.) Friendster tried to stop this, wanting people to be serious and fit into pre-defined checkboxes - to know who they are. MySpace let these groups run wild and these are the two populations who dominate MySpace - youth (14-24) and 20/30-somethings who participate actively in cultural development (from performance artists to clubgoers to sex divas to wannabee celebrities). These sites are ideal for these populations, even if they make no sense to parents and professionals.

[...]

What's at stake here is what is called "subcultural capital" by academics. It is the kind of capital that anyone can get, if you are cool enough to know that it exists and cool enough to participate. It is a counterpart to "cultural capital" which is more like hegemonic capital. That was probably a bit too obscure. Let me give an example. Opera attendance is a form of cultural capital - you are seen as having money and class and even if you think that elongated singing in foreign languages is boring, you attend because that's what cultured people do. You need the expensive clothes, the language, the body postures, the social connects and the manners to belong. Limitations are economic and social. Rave attendance is the opposite. Anyone can get in, in theory... There are certainly hodgepodged clothes, street language and dance moves, but most folks can blend in with just a little effort. Yet, the major limitation is knowing that the rave exists. "Being in the know" is more powerful than money. You can't buy your way into knowledge of a rave.

"Coolness" is about structural barriers, about the lack of universal accessibility or parsability. Structural hurdles mean people put in more effort to participate. --Danah Boyd --Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? (danah.org)

When you put it this way, it looks like MySpace is heading for some inevitable high point, after which it will no longer be cool to use. Of course, it may morph into something that is completely different and thus gives people still more reason to continue using it.

Another interesting quote, that (to me) illustrates one of the core problems: "Even if your kid has a perfectly PG profile, the idea that s/he can hang with R-rated ones is flipping people out, even when the R-rated ones are perfectly normal in the context in which their created."

PG means "Parental Guidance," but MySpace is thriving because it encourages teenagers to develop their own identities without parental guidance ("There may be some profanity in these films. There may be some violence or brief nudity. But these elements are not deemed so intense as to require that parents be strongly cautioned beyond the suggestion of parental guidance. There is no drug use content in a PG-rated film." -- MPAA), in what is perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a safe zone, where they can delete and reorganize and start over if they don't like the result, and where they can count and link to the evidence of their own growing cultural capital.

One of Boyd's points is a call to action: "Stop celebrating the crisis and get off your asses and engage. This panic is not just a funny side note. It is an industry wide problem concerning speech, property and responsibility."

As for the fad issue:

Part of being an American teen is figuring out who you are, how you fit into society and culture, how social relations work, etc. Part of this process involves sharing cultural objects, hanging out and trying out different self-performances to find the one that feels "right" (think Goffman "faces"). There are plenty of adults who are doing this as well, but it is central to youth culture. Youth will always do this, using whatever medium is available to them. MySpace is far more deeply situated in the cultural values and practices of its constituents than Friendster ever was. MySpace teens may jump ship, but they are not going to stop doing identity work, at least not for a few years.

But what interests me the most is the first few lines of the "Finally" section:

I began this as a blog post and it grew and grew and i want to put it out there even though i know that i'm missing factors. Still, i think that this should answer many of the questions that people have. MySpace is not the same as Friendster - it will not fade in the same way. Friendster was a fad; MySpace has become far more than that.

Notice the use of lowercase "i", and then a few sentences later, an academic semicolon. I'm not pointing this out as part of a grammar flame, I'm just noting this as Boyd's signal to her online audience that she is a serious scholar who is nevertheless firmly on the side of the MySpace teens. (A recent blog entry explained her frustration at being told not to use the term "MySpace whores" in the title of a talk.)

This fall, when I plan to introduce a new focus on social identity into my existing Writing for the Internet class (which I last revised in order to include blogging), part of my focus will be to get my students (especially those who are fresh out of high school) to recognize that the public identity they create can and often will lead to consequences in the real world.

My point isn't to stop them from celebrating the freedom the internet offers them, but rather to consider the full range of consequences. Yes, I want to encourage them to spread their wings and make new mistakes, but I'm also conscious of my responsibility to teach them that Google doesn't forget.

Reading Boyd's essay made me feel my age. This is not a bad thing... at 37 I'm still a young scholar, but the online landscape I've been studying for years is changing faster than I can master it. I'm realizing that each time I teach "Writing for the Internet" or "New Media Projects," the course will be practically brand new. On the one hand, that's a bit frightening, because it often takes more than one try to tweak a new unit until it works smoothly. On the other hand, since online culture is part of the content of the course, I won't be blindsided by new developments in the same way as I might be if I concentrated only on teaching American literature.

As I look back at the 2005-2006 academic year, I'm comfortable with the realization that Boyd and other up-and-coming new media scholars are providing a steady stream of insight that reminds me how my view of the internet is likely to differ from that of my students. Interesting things happen when both teachers and learners leave their comfort zones. I don't think I've ever been this excited about a new academic year.

This fall, I'll continue to advise the Setonian, while teaching

• a new freshman composition course (all punctuation, sentences, paragraphs, and process, without the build up to the end-of-term research paper that has dominated every freshman writing course I've taught in the last 8 years)
• Writing for the Internet (which will include social networking, personal identity, and the remix culture, as well as professional e-mail etiquette and website usability)
• New Media Projects (an upper level studio course in which students will create simple arcade games, interactive fiction, an animated essay [more on that when I figure out how to teach it, but Strongbad and the Jib Jab shorts come to mind], and a Half-Life 2 mod).

On another note, I'm also interested in this post, On Being a Press Expert . This could be useful to teach freshmen about the value of academic peer review, and specifically why it's important to go directly to sources written by academic experts, rather than rely on statements that they make off the top of their heads in response to a journalist's question.

"Students have told us that eMail is still valuable--mainly for storing and transmitting documents and for communication with adults," said Julie Evans, chief executive officer of the nonprofit group NetDay. "IM is more valuable to them because it is instant, and they can speak with multiple people at the same time. I believe that this highlights a greater sophistication in student tech use--and a trend for us to watch." --For students, eMail already is outdated  (eSchool News Online)

A few weeks ago, a student said to me in passing, "I only use e-mail to talk to my professors."

That made me start thinking.

According to Jankowski, the move offers the opportunity to escape an oppressive regime.

"Mom and Dad watch everything I do," Jankowski said. "But now, I'll be able to hear them coming down the stairs. And, if I'm slick about it, I'll be able to sneak out the basement window and, like, party."

Across the country, millions of suburban teens have sought better lives in the subterranean realm, a topic Dr. Grant Tompkins explores in Where The Floor Is Paved With Cement: An Adolescent's Quest For His Underground Domain, an account of his own teenage post-war journey downstairs. --In Search Of A Better Life, Teen Moves Downstairs (Onion (Satire))

Trekkies will be setting their phasers to "bid" this fall when Christie's holds the first official studio auction of memorabilia from all five "Star Trek" television series and 10 movie spin-offs. --Christie's to hold "Star Trek" garage sale (Reuters)

I'm proud -- or, more accurately, nerdy enough -- to say I recognized every one of the props mentioned in this article. I think the "10-inch Resikkan nonplaying prop brass flute used by Patrick Stewart as Picard in the episode 'The Inner Light'" will go for more than the $300 estimated.

--Pope John Paul II and jerz

My sister sent me a link to the Amazon.com page for this book... I'm honored.

But even still I wrote about work inbetween pictures of me drinking, opiononated rants on creationism and conservation, I use the words cunt and twat and fuck. I joke about kicking babies and coat hanger abortions. I wax poetic about spring breaks past and Zombie movies.

Once I made it up to the meeting they had to change thier game plan. They had my entire blog printed out with pictures and highlighted passages. I was told as soon as I walked in that I was being terminated. The reason was the content of my blog. My blog had to be removed and my myspace account had to be deconstructed. I had untill noon the next day. I was still sobbing kind of quietly but I didn't want them to think that I was ashamed of what I had written. My parents read my blog. My old college friends keep up with my life through my blog. I took my badge off and looked at the mean HR lady who was smiling smuggly at me. She told me perhaps next time I would be more wise in my lifestyle and decision making choices regaurding work.

I was fired because of the way I represented myself on the internet. --Jessa Jeffries --This Blog will self destruct in less than twelve hours (Metafilter)

I looked briefly at Jeffries' blog before it went down, and quite frankly I can't say that I'm surprised.

It's not a First Amendment issue if an employer decides your blog makes you the kind of person they wouldn't want to hire. Jeffries called the kids for whom she presented "dummies," she linked to porn and myspace exhibitionists, used a church-sign generator to publish offensive messages, posted photos of herself and friends drinking, etc.

While none of these activities is illegal, and while the behind-the-scenes view of working at an animal museum is well written and entertaining, quite frankly I'm not at all surprised that her employers took this approach.

Threatening to sue her unless she deletes her entire blog -- including the entries that have nothing to do with her workplace -- strikes me as overkill.

Still, Jeffries showed very poor judgment.

In what might be a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, a Pennsylvania lawyer is suing the publisher of the rapidly growing online world Second Life, alleging the company unfairly confiscated tens of thousands of dollars worth of his virtual land and other property. --Kathleen Craig --Second Life Land Deal Goes Sour (Wired)

Sure, Leonardo studied birds in order to design a flying machine. But if you built it and jumped off the side of a mountain, they'd be scrapping you off the bottom of the valley. Of course very few people could have painted "Mona Lisa." But hell, anybody can come up with a device permitting you to plunge to your death while waving your arms.

Why should he get all the press, while Athanasius Kircher remains in relative obscurity? --Scott McLemee --The Kircher Code (Inside Higher Ed)

Casual Game: The Game uses a special wireless-control wand covered with buttons. Using this control, your job is to scan through a large number of audio-visual "entertainment streams" to find the one you enjoy the most.

Once you've picked one, you can control the volume of the audio, the brightness of the screen and, for advanced casual gamers, the tint. --Lore Sjöberg --The Games Nobody Lines Up to Play (Wired)

This excerpt is from the best item in the story, though Mission: Marketplace is pretty good, too.

If you're stuck, shut down the word doc you're working on and start again, from scratch, in an email (putting the name of a close friend in the "To:" field can help). --Matt Weston --Write how you speak (Business Bricks)

While I don't think the adage "write how you speak" applies universally, it makes good sense in the context within which Weston presents it (on a website for small business owners), and at any rate this e-mail suggestion is a good tactic.

--Key & Compass - IF Games Index

This is an incredibly efficient, beautifully constructed index to interactive fiction games, with icons indicating platform, awards, and additional information.

I wish I could click on the award icon and be taken to a list of other games that shared the same award. Actually, clicking on any icon ought to filter out the results that don't share that quality -- for instance, if I only want to look at games that won the IF Art Show "Best of Show."

There are other sites that offer that sort of information, but because I know it's available, I missed it when I was briefly poking around this site.

The disasters that have occurred so far have been on the local or regional level. They have been horribly damaging to lives and properties in the regions in which they occurred, but they have not been the paradigm-shifting harbingers of doom that the pessimists, like Kunstler, continually warn about. In fact, so far the pessimists have been 100 percent wrong 100 percent of the time.

The fact is that since the close of World War II the world has been experiencing an age of progress that is nearly unequaled in human history. More people have more food, more shelter, more access to medical care, more access to transportation, to education, and to technology than ever before. Of course, problems remain to be solved and progress is yet to be made in a number of areas. But advances since World War II - leading to such marvels as the Internet, personal computing, and synthetic materials, to name but a few - have allowed millions to live in greater comfort and dignity than ever before. The lesson of the last 50 years is that the future is brighter than the naysayers will have people believe as technology allows people the chance to enjoy and pursue other endeavors, including what is truly important. Looking forward, then, here are eight major areas in which rapid technological advance will improve the way people live. --Dennis Behreandt --Future Tech (Red Orbit)

First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes relationships fragile in the face of conflict. --Daniel Enemark --It's all about me: Why e-mails are so easily misunderstood (CS Monitor)

Even though I had to use many strategies to sell semiconductors in Silicon Valley, it was nothing compared to the brain power I've had to use to teach a subject to college students well. A decade ago, I found advertising challenging. Dreaming up new ways to sell a product or service to corporate executives was exhilarating; still, it was nothing compared to finding ways to reach a student population of incredibly diverse abilities.

And professors do not "clock out" at 5 p.m. As one online colleague posted, "The work is infinite. There is always one more thing you could, should, would like to do." The industry encourages workaholism. Professors that "do it all" are promoted and given tenure. Those that buckled under the need to publish, teach, do research, serve on committees, and do informal public relations work are pushed out of this tremendously competitive business. For many, it's exhausting. --The Exhausting Job of Teaching (Inside Higher Ed)

I spent the weekend in bed. I'm on the mend, thank goodness, but during the time I was too ill to mark papers, I filled numerous pages with sketches of new ideas for teaching, made some excellent progress teaching myself Inform 7, created a game with Game Maker, and read SHU's summer reading novel for this fall.

Truth be told, all of that was enjoyable and relaxing. I drove into work feeling like I'd been on a little retreat.

Of course, now I have to write my annual report (which is already late), and do more committee work. Oh, and turn in final grades. So I'm going to pay for it all. (Just as soon as I finish procrastinating a little bit longer...)

I'll get through it all, I'm sure.

"If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say 'Do you want to learn how to program a computer?', only a few hands will go up," says Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch.

"But if you walk in and say 'Do you want to learn how to tell a story and make a movie?', all the hands go up." --Mark Roth --CMU uses game maker's characters to interest girls in computer programming (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

I interviewed Pausch when he was working at the University of Virginia and I was a PR writer there. He was doing VR at the time. (This was around 1991, so the big VR wave hadn't crested at the time.)

I came across this article while Googling for Game Maker, a very slick point-and-click tool for creating sprite-based games. A fully functional version is free, but the paid version is only $20. I had used a similar product, Games Factory, but that hasn't been updated in years. The creator of Game Maker obviously has education in mind -- the site's documentation is written for non-experts.

Of course I'll be sacrificing power when I choose a point-and-click tool. But people who aren't planning to be computer programmers can stand to learn quite a lot about the world through picking up the basic concepts of game design, just as people who don't plan to be novelists can learn from a freshman comp course.

--MySpace: The Movie (YouTube)

I just watched MySpace: The Movie. (Above link goes to the version on YouTube, which is more accessible, but the filmmaker's site is davidlehre.com.)

The cross-dressing gag is just juvenile, and the editing in that skit needed to be tighter. Overall, though, this little collection of skits is a good window into a pop culture online world that used to be inhabited only by geeks, but thrives beneath the radar of mainstream culture. All these little stories are parables about responsibility. I'm too muddle-headed with a fever to process this short film deeply, but I'd be happy to know what anyone else thinks.

I might assign this film in my Writing for the Internet class, along with student Karissa Kilgore's newspaper column.

For the 4Cs, I recently submitted a proposal that the weblog special interest group and the wiki special interest group be merged to form the "Emerging Social Software" group.

The city's 23-year-old mayor took down his profile on MySpace.com after his occupation ended up reading: "malebigalow."

Ryan Bingham said he didn't post that information -- an apparent reference to the 1999 movie "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" -- and he doesn't know who did. --Mayor pulls MySpace.com page after job shows up as 'malebigalow' (Boston.com | AP)

With the seconds ticking down to a studio discussion about a court case involving Apple Computer and The Beatles' record label, a floor manager had run to reception and grabbed the man, thinking he was Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, a specialist internet publication.

Actually, he was a minicab driver who had been waiting to drive Mr Kewney home. --Fare comment! (The Mail)

The video of the interview is hysterical.

You're sick, so you stay with your germs in bed. I'll get you some trail mix so you don't go poking around the hearse. -- my wifeFreudian Slip (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Yes, she really said "hearse."

I'm not that sick, but it's true that I can only concentrate on one thing at a time.

I have been in bed most of the weekend. I went home early Thursday and Friday, though both days I had an 8am exam to give, and I did drag myself out of bed for graduation exercises.

I'm actually fine in the morning, after a good night's rest, but in the midafternoon I start to fade pretty fast.

My wife took the kids to her aunt's house for the day. Last year, I was also sick on Mother's Day, and Leigh took the kids to her aunt's house without me.

This comes at the worst possible time, because I still have final grades to figure. Then there is the final onslaught of meetings, paperwork, and projects that everybody puts off until grades are finished. So I've got myself scheduled full-time through June 1.

In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist's zillion competing ideas?an internal, self-contradicting mob?and focus them into a coherent work.

Mind you, online collaborators are finding that freedoms are important too. The journalist JD Lasica recently put his unpublished book, Darknet, on a wiki?a type of collaboration Web site where anyone can edit a page or write a new one?and encouraged his readership to edit it. But readers mostly offered only tiny edits, such as grammatical fixes or fact-checks. Nobody plunged in and rewrote an entire section. Lasica suspects his book was too fully formed: People didn't want to mess with something that seemed finished. He thinks a better idea would be to post a much rougher draft of the book to make it seem more like clay that can be molded. --Clive Thompson --Art Mobs: Can an online crowd create a poem, a novel, or a painting? (Slate)

While this article is a couple years old, I found it interesting due to all the time I spent yesterday waiting in line and sitting in a crowd (as part of SHU's graduation exercises).

It takes a lot of work to organize something like a graduation procession. As a faculty member, all I have to do is follow the person in front of me. As long as a few people know where we're going, it will work out. But if someone in that position of authority hesitates, or gives a bad cue, the confusion can multiply.

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
Why would I go and do that?
What are you, stupid? That is so stupid. --Delicious Pundit --Chris Berman Slash Poetry (Deadspin)

Student Matt Hampton sent me this link. Thanks for the laugh, Matt!

"A lot of students in their early education do not get a very good grounding from their instructors about when it's acceptable to use somebody else's material," says Jane Kirtley, who teaches Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota. "There's also a sense among students today that if it's something they can find on the Internet, then by definition, they can use it freely without attributing it to anybody."

The Internet provides plenty of temptations for would-be plagiarists, from essay-writing services to millions of Web pages. The easy availability of such resources can cloud judgment and lead to misuse or abuse of information. "On the part of students, there's an eerie logic to justify cheating," says Denise Pope, a lecturer at the School of Education at Stanford University and author. "It's three o'clock in the morning, you're exhausted, you've worked hard ... rather than getting a zero, you'd take your chances with plagiarism." --What Is The Price Of Plagiarism? (CBS News)

Forwarded to me by John Spurlock.

In some respects, the students are right: Professors are to blame.

We cultivate students' unmerited pride with high praise for mediocre work. And we tolerate all of the other sins by abdicating responsibility for the culture of our classrooms. Again and again, I have heard students say their classes are so easy that almost no effort is required, even for top grades. Residential student life, at many institutions, is mostly free time to explore and indulge one's vices. And we professors -- too busy chasing our ambitions -- avoid maintaining standards because they are time-consuming and costly to our teaching evaluations. --Thomas H. Benton --The 7 Deadly Sins of Professors (Chronicle)

I'd been looking forward to this one since Benton published the 7 Deadly Sins of Students.

In any field, it's important to keep track of the underdogs -- the new developments and theories, the older hypotheses once thought exhausted of information. Doesn't matter if you're in writing, physics, psychology, or athletics, keeping a broad horizon pays off. That's what I'm doing here -- showing you the underdogs of gaming. You might find something you like. --Karl "Orikaeshigitae" Parakenings --Text Adventres (Cardinal Points)

Good to see some more mainstream attention given to contemporary interactive fiction. The obligatory "history of interactive fiction" section takes up much of the article, which is the same frustration I found when I was researching 1980s articles for my IF annotated bibliography, since I'm more interested in reading this particular author's unique take on IF than in reading yet another paraphrasing of the same backstory. (Don't these people know how to use hyperlinks?) Still, I'm happy I found this column. Via GTA.

This allows us to see the underlying problem of digital game studies: 'narratologists' and 'ludologists' alike would rather be fragged to bits than make a negative value judgement.

The reason for this is to be found in the history of game studies: once upon a time, videogames were only taken seriously by psychologists. They would lock up a 14-year-old to play Street Fighter II for 48 hours straight, submit him to a marathon of Rorschach ink blot tests, and then come out of the lab convinced of the detrimental effects of videogames (but without a second thought about the detrimental effects of their testing methods).

When game studies emerged from the primordial digital ooze in the mid-1990s, this kind of research was still prevalent. It is therefore understandable that 'serious' game researchers are loath to utter a bad word about their object of study. If they would proclaim a certain videogame 'bad', this might be taken to mean that all videogames are bad. So, to be on the safe side, game studies has reverted to a particularly bland variant of formalism and stuck to it. --Julian Kücklich --Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Herrigan: First Person. New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Dichtung Digital)

This 2004 review of First Person is... interesting. The narratology/ludology infighting has largely (thankfully) settled down, but I blogged it anyway because it usefully points out one of the major problems in new media studies. It takes time to get yourself published on paper. The extra time (and expense) doesn't help the value of your printed scholarship. It does, however, ensure that your work will be out of date sooner.

In my current job, I've felt that my online work is appropriately valued. My department chair lists his own blog on his annual report, and the other day he told me that some of his blog entries are going to be published in Croatian.

The archetype of the mad scientist was Rotwang in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). Played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Rotwang had unruly hair, a disabled hand, and obsessive research interests. He worked alone, and although he lived in a modern city that his inventions made function, he was like a 16th-century alchemist. --The Scientist on Camera (Slate)

Hmm... While Old Rossum and Young Rossum only appear in dialogue in RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots), the popularity of that play surely makes it more important as an archetype of "science turning against the scientist."

Elsewhere on the site, there's an allusion to Doctor Faustus, which predates Rotwang by centuries, but we can go back to classical times to Vulcan/Hephaestus (the deformed god of the forge), which predates them both by millennia.

Since the slideshow was titled "The Scientist on Camera," naturally those earlier versions were excluded. But the text does not clearly specify that the examples were chosen based on the availabllity of photographic images.

Millman, whose essay is called "Game Theory," sees "Lost's" structure attracting fans via familiarity: She thinks it works like an interactive video game. "The story line and the action develop on multiple levels. There are hidden clues that function like the Easter eggs in gaming," says Millman. "'Lost" is a big game, and the act of watching it forces you to play along." --Lost in 'Lost': Devoted 'Lost' fans try to decode hit TV show's symbolism (AZ Central.com)

I haven't watched more than a snippet of this show, but my wife sometimes watches it while I'm putting the kids to bed. Looks like good TV that respects the intelligence of the audience, and a good example of how the internet, literary analysis, and transmedial crossovers can add value to an experience. (I'm referring to the fake TV commercial, a real novel supposedly written by a character on the island, etc.)

-- Reinhold Grether --Virtual Performance Bibliography (netzwissenschaft)

Designed for courses "Theater and the Internet" & "The Digital Arena."

Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the presence," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.

Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art. --Rafaela von Bredow --BRAZIL'S PIRAHÃ TRIBE: Living without Numbers or Time (Spiegel Online)

This article reminds me more than anything else I've encountered lately that language is a technology -- a skill that we have developed in order to enhance our natural abilities.

I used to think George Orwell was being coy and clever when he presented the concept of Newspeak -- that an oppressive government could eliminate a concept such as "freedom" by first redefining it, and then legislating the word out of existence.

This article makes me want to teach 1984, which I've never done.

--Windows Noises by Colin Staples (Albino Blacksheep)

Cool Flash movie.

My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to construct narratives about the struggle to regain freedom in novels such as Gravity's Rainbow, Invitation to a Beheading, and VALIS. On a disciplinary level, heretical reading is an interpretative method I exert to foreground possibilities of freedom within postmodern fiction that intrude into the background of the poststructuralist definition of the world but ultimately transcend it. These four forms of freedom are freedom as presence and transcendence, as liberating knowledge, as a spirituality constituting self-awareness, and as choice conceived navigationally rather than hierarchically. Postmodern authors imply these possibilities consciously and metafictionally, but heretical reading is also my way of foregrounding and intensifying them. I amplify these possibilities through a process that includes the skeptical questioning encouraged by both postmodern novels and poststructuralism, but this process is not limited to the poststructuralist ambitions of critique, disclosure, and debunking. Instead, I critique inauthentic and unquestioned claims to freedom so that intimations of their genuine possibility can be experienced in greater intensity.

This way of reading is a choice that is invited and encouraged by the authors of postmodern novels but not demanded by them. In order to function as a method, heretical reading requires my intervention as a reader to bring these possibilities to the foreground and to navigationally choose them. Heretical reading refers to my way of navigating through these texts, taking a path that diverges from poststructuralism by connecting intimations of freedom which poststructuralist theorists leave unnoticed and unconnected. By linking these fragmentary and multi-linear intimations, a sequential process of seeking freedom can be revealed, in which each possibility of freedom constitutes a step whose attainment allows both characters and readers to move to the next step. I implement the full potential of heretical reading in technological pedagogy, by allowing the possibilities of freedom suggested by authors to generate a program of invention and interaction that authorizes multiple interpretative operations on the part of students.

A third chapter argues that heretical reading can be extended into the pedagogical use of hypertext, the electronic textual format of the World Wide Web, in order to advance the same goals of freedom as question and process sought by my readings of postmodern novels. Students compose hypertext essays that make a new interpretative choice by choosing a path through the text that has been closed off by a previous group of critics. This path consists of the linkages between ?sparks??passages that stand out with particular imaginative and intuitive significance against a background of indeterminacy. Students learn to justify their responses to these passages through textual evidence of their richness and significance, similar to the Russian formalist idea that ?defamiliarization? foregrounds certain elements of the text by making them strange. A fourth dissertation chapter describes a final pedagogical extension of heretical reading as a strategy for using theories of computer and video game design within the literature classroom, with emphasis on a type of text-based computer game called interactive fiction. This method transforms printed novels into interactive fictions in order to encourage freedom in the form of interaction with the text. The various interpretative operations performed on a text during classroom discussion change the ways the text is imagined and experienced, just as players of an interactive fiction direct the outcome of a story by typing input in response to prompts. The convictions underlying heretical reading function within the classroom as a set of rules, but these rules are designed to open up, not to constrain; to energetically orient, not to govern; to yield satisfactions at the expressive level, not to conclude. --Jeffrey Lamar Howard --Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy (University of Texas at Austin)

(Ephasis added.)

I haven't had the chance to read through it yet, but I plan to print up a copy and read it during the exams I'll be proctoring over the next few days. (The link goes to a big PDF, by the way.)

Looks very good. And it comes just in time for me to include it in my annual report. (Howard cites and engages nicely with my online definition of interactive fiction, and places it within a larger context in a manner that I found illuminating and instructive.)

Apart from the occasional reference as a postmodern, reader-response, or purely formal example, interactive fiction has existed in something of a theoretical vacuum, dismissed by the cybergurus as a nostalgic narrative throwback, and ignored by the literati as too geeky. Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages is a notable exception, though his focus on MIT and the cultural origins of Zork means much room is left for additional studies (like Howard's). Here, we see interactive fiction invoked, not as an extreme example, or as an object of nostalgic inquiry, or a "look-how-far-we-have-come" reference point, but rather as an integral part of a larger argument about new media development.

At least the cybergurus have memories of how cool IF seemed when they first encountered it; yet sadly, in the literary world IF is mostly encountered through transcripts published in literary works.

I'd love it if Howard published an electronic dissertation, with embedded links to live versions of all the IF works he mentioned (copyright laws permitting), but lacking that ideal text I'm still delighted at what seems (to my first glance) an excellent integration of contemporary IF community standards and culture, and mainstream literary theory. Yet it's the technological pedagogy that really interests me the most.

On another note, it was interesting to see, within the context of Howard's academic prose, passages I had written for my website -- reproduced along with the boldface keywords that I added for the convenience of online readers. Those bold words leap oddly off of Howard's academic pages, as if they were spoken shouted by a slightly drunk or at least rather obnoxious bar patron who's getting insecure because he's just starting to suspect you're baiting him. Not that I really think Howard was baiting me -- I'm just commenting on how it might look to someone who wonders why the heck this Jerz guy feels it is necessary to use bold keywords all the time.

I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that's a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I've been working on GET LAMP and occasionally doing some inquiries regarding the arcade stuff. --Jason Scott --Arcade: The Documentary (ASCII by Jason Scott)

I just ordered a copy of Scott's documentary BBS (or, to be more accurate, I submitted a budget request for it). I do hope he'll be able to get his fancy camera into Colossal Cave. Meanwhile, the arcade project sounds like another brilliant idea.

Timbuktu and SHU (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Seton Hill University's summer reading book is Timbuktu, a shaggy dog story. (Only the dog's not so shaggy.)

I stated reading while proctoring a final exam yesterday, and I finished it that evening during my son's piano lesson. Reading the whole book (less than 200 pages) couldn't have taken more than 2 1/2 hours.

Mr. Bones is neither White Fang nor Snoopy. I didn't mind the fantastic expectation that he understands English, but once or twice when the author falls back on "..but he didn't know any of that, because he was just a dog" I thought the limited anthropomorphism wasn't working.

I'd rather the author have bitten the bullet, and just given us a story about a dog that understands humans better than we understand ourselves. If it's a good story, I'll accept it the same way I would accept a self-aware computer or a magic ring that turns you invisible or a clerk waking up one morning having transformed into a giant insect, or that the universe is controlled by the Force.

I liked the word play in Willy's scenes, and felt that overall the story works -- that is, it's an adaptation in novel form of the shaggy dog story: a long-winded, masterfully told, but annoyingly anticlimactic joke.

We had an Irish Setter ("Mayo") when I was a kid, and my sister had a mostly-lab-part-something ("Gem," named for a wide-eyed empath in an episode of classic Star Trek). But I suppose parts of the book would register more with me if I were a pet owner, just as news reports or movies that depict children in danger grab me more powerfully now that I am a parent.

I liked how the author stretched out the inevitable death scene, or more precisely I was entertained by the literary quality of the stories Astor used to fill that space. I was willing to give the epic quest plot a chance, and wasn't disappointed. I think I was expecting some encounter with another dog, and would have enjoyed looking at canine society in contrast to human society, but Mr. Bones remains a loner. A was a little disappointed that the scattered references to the Holocaust didn't go anywhere. Their effect was to make me question myself for identifying with a dog, after briefly raising the plight of people who are hunted like dogs.

The last scenario in the story, which brings Mr. Bones into the world of suburban lawns and minivans, could have been the beginning of a sappy story about how a dog came into the life of any of a handful of people and changed them forever, but that's not the story Astor wants to tell. I was actually grateful that he doesn't spend a lot of time fleshing out that family, since quite frankly we can write the story in our heads once he sketches out what Mr. Bones brings to that family and how his presence alters its dynamics.

A quick read. The structure was more interesting to me than the content, but because the structure was so good, and the digressions entertaining, I didn't really mind that.

Photon vs Electron (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My son at age 8 is turning out to be quite the science geek. While I was driving him home from piano lesson today, he asked me whether an electron is the smallest thing in the universe.

I took at stab at it and guessed that maybe a photon is smaller, since its the smallest possible measurement of light. I remembered that light sometimes acts like a wave and sometimes acts like a particle. A photon has properties that are similar to a wave, right? And a wave can be endlessly long, and the wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum varies quite a bit, with the measurements extending to the very small and the very large.

Thinking about it logically, I suppose that photons have to be comparatively large, since they can be blocked by fairly thin sheets of matter.

I've checked Wikipedia and a few other sites, and now I'm realizing that asking about the size of a photon is like asking how big is blue, or how smooth is a loud sound. We can measure the wavelength of blue light, or we can convert a loud sound into a signal with peaks and valleys we can measure.

Here is a good collection of articles: The Nature of Light.

I'm not sure I'm ready to explain quarks and superstrings to my son, but as soon as I publish this, I'm going to go tell him that I was wrong about the photon.

Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth.

[...]

Troubled as the world may be today, it is incontestably less poor, less unhealthy, and less hungry than it was 30 years ago. And this positive association between world population growth and material advance goes back at least as far as the beginning of the 20th century.

Let us consider -- or rather, reconsider -- what took place in the 20th century's "population explosion." The basic story is well known. A precise count is impossible, but between 1900 and 2000 human numbers almost quadrupled, from around 1.6 billion to more than six billion; in pace or magnitude, nothing like that surge had ever occurred. But why exactly did we experience a world population explosion in the 20th century?

It was not because people suddenly started breeding like rabbits -- rather, it was because they finally stopped dying like flies --Nicholas Eberstadt --Doom and Demography (Wilson Quarterly)

Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The Big Electromagnetic Pulse the PDFs will be wiped clean off my hard drive but I will still be able to barter my hard copy of Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life for food and bullets.

But my passion for paper is about more than preserving the sociological canon in a post-apocalyptic future. Using paper is embodied in a way that using digital resources are not. Paper has a corporeality that digital texts do not. For instance, have you ever tried to find a quote in a book and been unable to remember whether it was on the left or right hand side of the page? This just a trivial example of way in which paper's physicality is the origin of its utility.

And of course professors have bodies too. This is another way that scholarship is embodied -- we often do it while in libraries. Here our bodies are literally in a vast assemblage of paper with its own unique form of usability. And as scholars achieve total communion with the stacks, they find books based not just on catalog number, but on all of their senses. The fourth floor of the library I wrote my Ph.D. in sounded and smelled differently than the second did. How many of us -- even the lab scientists -- with Ph.D.'s will ever be able to forget the physical layout of the libraries where we wrote our dissertations? --Alex Golub --Passion for Paper (Inside Higher Ed)

We've developed a physical relationship to paper because we *need* that relationship in order to use it.

I used to spend a lot of time sorting and filing documents on my hard drive. Then I installed Google Desktop, and now, while I still file my in-progress documents meticulously, the flood of incoming e-mails and files just goes into a slush pile.

This term, I experimented with an all-paperless semester, having students submit all their assignments electronically (other than short in-class quizzes and the like). It did change the way I grade, because I can no longer signal "I don't follow you here" by squiggling a line under a phrase and adding a question mark.

But there are other benefits to the online-only classroom. No more lugging a shoulder bag stuffed with papers to my car every evening (and lugging them all back, mostly ungraded, the next morning). I no longer have students running after me, waving late copies of papers. No more "I asked my roommate to slip it under your office door shortly before the deadline, but I'm worried that he's unreliable, so I'm just sending you this e-mail to let you know I'll bring the printout when I get back from Spring Break in 10 days" excuses. If a student really has missed a deadline by 10 minutes, it's no big deal -- the date stamp is right there on their e-submission.

Even in the digital world, though, my media has physicality. I write a different way when I am scratching something out on my PDA. I find that I actually enjoy writing recommendation letters for students while I'm sitting with my son during his piano lesson. And I feel subversive and efficient when my daughter asks me to watch The Lion King for the 20th time, and I can sit there on the couch next to her critiquing student thesis statements.

I remember a rush of familiarity when watching an episode of The Simpsons some time ago, when -- in a flashback sequence -- Homer checked his LED watch. LEDs (light emitting diodes) burn so much power that your watch was dark until you pushed a button. I had remembered that, but I had forgotten that the way you viewed seconds was to hold the button down long enough for the display to switch. Seeing that brought back memories of my the Star Wars watch my parents bought me in 1977, and the choice I had of personalizing it by means of a tiny sticker of Darth Vader, Artoo and Threepio, and I think it was a logo with an X wing fighter. I also remember the exact location of the doorway where I tripped, fell, and scratched the surface of the watch. I had the same feeling then that I had years later when I was carrying my daughter through campus, and she fussed and fidgeted and knocked my gleaming burnished aluminum PDA out of my pocket, where it fell onto the sidewalk and got scratched up. (Not the display, thankfully, just the case.)

In the late 80s, I remember videotaping the startup sequence for whatever computer I was using at the time. Probably the Commodore 64. I think my reasoning was that if my *next* computer ever made me impatient during the bootup sequence, I could watch this videotape of my *previous* computer and be comforted that things were now much better than they used to be.

Of course, now computers do SO MUCH stuff during bootup that even though they're much more powerful, I doubt the bootup time is any faster. (That's why I like carrying around a PDA -- there's no lag time between whatever idea you had and your ability to start recording it.)

By the way, that video that I made of my old computer? It was on a Betamax tape. Oh, well.

In a hole in the ground lives a hobbit. A nasty, dirty, wet hole contains ends of worms and an oozy smell. A dry, bare, sandy hole contains nothing to sit down on or eat. The hole in the ground is a hobbit hole. "That means comfort." --Brian Slesinsky has some fun with Inform 7 syntax. --Hello, Hobbit (rec.arts.int-fiction)

Can you tell what I've been thinking about lately?

Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages - you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well, if Inform is a cathedral, its explicit support for extensions is the equivalent of inviting the townsfolk in to set up their stalls.

[...]

I do want to make Inform accessible to a wider community. The manual says that it is for "computer programmers intrigued by writing, and writers intrigued by computer programming", but truthfully, I'd like to see IF tools - not just design systems, but also iTunes-like browsers and interpreters - which open up IF to that huge creative community of people who write blogs, and design their own websites, often startlingly well. IF will never be for everyone, but I would like it to be on the table as a viable form of artistic expression.--Graham Nelson --[Graham Nelson and Emily Short discuss Inform 7] (Society for the Promotion of Advengure Games)

Nelson is here referring to Eric Raymond's hymn to the open source movement, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."

Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America's most successful people cut corners to get where they are? Cheating is how the real world works, he said. Look at the politicians who lie or the sluggers who take steroids, or the CEOs who cook the books. The student also pointed to the hurdles he faced as he tried to get ahead: high tuition costs, heavy student loans, low-paying jobs without benefits. America wasn't a fair place for kids like him, so it made sense to try to level the playing field by bending a few rules. --David Callahan --A better way to prevent student cheating (Christian Science Monitor)

I think that ultimatley a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression. But, you do end up killing literally hundres of representations of high- schoolers. But 'm not sure the ulitimate intention was to trivialize it. It seemed like the purpose was to expose people to what happened in a unique perspective. There are probably a lot of people that would find it and play it out of curiosity. And find out more about Columbine than they usually would have were it not in game form. And in this process learn that what they did was not glamorous in any way. There is a weird part after the school where you die, and then go to hell, which I suppose is appropriate. And it looks like that part kind of does make heroes out of them to some degree, because you're killing demons and such. Which is kind of an odd digreesion. I think its supposed to resemble the fact that they played violent games and such. Which is the primary audience of this game, people that like violent games. Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games why not learn something important in the process? And in that process I think it might become apparent that what they did was not heroic in any way and shouln't be glamorized. But it is a mixed- message at best. --Richard Castaldo --Columbine Survivor Talks About Columbine RPG (Kotaku.com)

Castaldo was paralyzed from the chest down when fellow Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold launched their infamous assault.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I'd rather have the thousand words. -- Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fictionI'd rather have the thousand words (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Only the truly geeky will appreciate just what it means to find yourself in someone else's Usenet tagline. I happened upon a this list of taglines, compiled by Linus Akesson, because that collection includes my platitude along with more sensible quotations from Shakespeare, Socrates, the Bible, the TV show Frasier, and Guybrush Threepwood.

I blush to see my narratological bias so baldly professed. I was, of course, posting on a newsgroup devoted to interactive fiction (aka text adventure games), and thus perhaps the privileged position of text is to be expected. In my further defense, I was responding to a troll who asserted "there simply isn't an excuse to not use pictures in an IF game," and constrained the pro-narrative statement as follows:

I can think of a lot more things than I can render graphically. If I started thinking of stories that consisted only of things that I can render, then I'd tell a lot of stories about spheres and planes. If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I'd rather have the thousand words -- at least until such time as the Holodeck frees me from the burden of having to render everything I can think of.

In context, I was stating my own preference for using words rather than pictures as my tools of choice for storytelling. Someone trained in graphic design, who only dabbles in writing, would have a very different opinion. And of course, regardless of whether the primary medium is images or text, does a game need a story in order to be successful? "Tetris" is the canonical example. (We need to be able to relate to the game world in some way, but a complex story is only one way to relate.)

I have created a few short interactive fiction games, and one that I entered in the IF Competition did fairly well despite its flaws, and received some fairly good reviews. In order to gain a more visceral understanding of a different genre of games, a few months ago, I shelled out a few bucks to purchase a copy of The Games Factory, a point-and-click utility for designing console-style 2D action games. My version of the software is dated 1996, so it's hardly cutting edge. I had already created some animated GIFs of Rainbow Hector, so I got started right away. The documentation is less than impressive, which slowed down my progress considerably. After a few false starts, I began to make some progress.

When I first heard the term "level designer" as a profession within the games industry, I laughed. If someone else designs the characters, and someone else codes the behaviors, and someone else handles interface, how hard can it be to put all the pieces together? But the more I learned about side-scrollers, and the more I got to know my PC and his relationship with the game world, the more skilled I grew at identifying aesthetic and philosophical flaws in various parts of the world. Yes, that metal I-beam structure looks cool, but what's it doing out there in the wilderness? Yes, there needs to be a monster there in order to give the PC something to jump over, but why would the monster hang out there when there is no PC to menace? What does the monster want? And why are these monsters here in the wilderness in the first place?

While the library of pre-coded objects and behaviors is impressive, the code describing those behaviors is sealed in a black box, safely away from the fumbling efforts of amateur programmers. Which would be fine, if I knew absolutely no programming, but which is extremely frustrating when I want to find out why, whenever my PC jumps sideways, a single frame of the face-front view of my PC flickers on the screen just as he lands. I have also spent far too much time tweaking a routine that, when the PC accelerates in one direction over a certain distance, scrolls the screen ahead slightly faster, so that the player has more time to react to objects that scroll into view.

The more I think about it, the more I notice, and the more critical I become of my own work, and the more aware I am of the criteria by which to evaluate the far more polished and accomplished work produced by others.

I have also been toying with the Half-Life 2 developer's toolkit, which includes a CAD suite that permits even the marginally geeky to create new 3D spaces. It's a simple matter to change a bitmap, perhaps to give a character a Seton Hill University T-shirt. But if I wanted to create, say, a small creature with a round head, no body to speak of, and six legs that end in stubby paws, drawing the bitmaps would be easy, but defining the 3D body parts and articulating them as the creature stands, sits, jumps, falls over, fires a weapon, receives a blow to the head, etc., I would quickly be in over my head. Still, even if I limit myself to the existing character bodies (perhaps repainted with different bitmaps), I should be able to record my own dialogue trees, which will help propel a story set in a virtual space of my own design.

Game design toolkits come with ready-made objects with behaviors that can be turned on or off with a few clicks. For instance, The Games Factory lets me control the PC directly with the mouse, or steer it like a car, or make it run and jump on platforms like Mario. My PC can shoot objects that fly across the screen. When these projectiles reach the edge of the screen, I can destroy them, make them bounce, or make them spawn new objects. When objects overlap, I can make them destroy each other, add points, scroll the screen, play a sound, load a web page, or do a hundred other things. In the Deus Ex toolkit, I could drop a cat and a dog in a room together, and by default the cat will flee and the dog will pursue. The AI is simplistic, but because I didn't have to code it up from scratch, I can focus my energies on tweaking it.

My mind boggles at the possibilities...

I'll always love interactive fiction, but when I started examining it seriously, it was just an obscure branch of literary studies. I have no delusions about creating a "real" 3D game, but I do feel compelled to experience the issues game developers face and sample the creative processes in which they participate.

I haven't yet seen a tool that I could use out of the box in a course for non-programmers (as all my courses are likely to be). It would take time to develop good documentation and a set of tutorial games, but in the right learning environment, what I've seen so far could work.

When Scott Adams, creator of the first commercial computer game, spoke at a panel I organized at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire in May of 2001, he said,

You've got to have the tools in place that allow you to become more and more creative. People like Amanda here [an English major who created an IF game as a term project --DGJ], shouldn't have to be a programmer to put into the media her creative thoughts. Today you have to be. Five years? I don't think that will be the case.

With the recent release of Inform 7, we're a step closer.

P.S. I was also surprised to find that my son is also quoted in the same list of taglines, as part of an exchange I posted to Usenet around the same time:

While reading ordinary books to my son (who turns three next month), I frequently stop and ask him questions about the story... his favorite book of late is "101 Dalmations," and sometimes I ask him, "If you saw Cruella De Vil chasing after those puppies, what would you say?"
One time, he said, "I would tell her, 'You don't hit puppies because that's mean.' "
"And what would Cruella do?"
"She would get back in her car and drive away."
"And then what would the puppies do?"
"They would get into a helicopter and fly home."
"And what would you do?"
(pause)
"I wouldn't do anything because I'm not in the book."

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 -- Curvy Organic Object (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it's curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I've ever created.

I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.

Everything I've read on the internet suggests that Blender is a better program, but the interface for Blender is non-standard. That is, the interface doesn't work the same way every other Windows program works. After spending just a little time with Blender, I can certainly understand why Blender's interface works the way it does, but I'm conscious that I'll be teaching students who aren't computer experts. Do I want to force them to learn a completely new way of thinking about GUI, just to get them to understand some basic 3D design concepts? Probably not.

I'm still not sure whether I'll be able to import Anim8or objects into Hammer (Valve's tool for creating Half-Life 2 worls).

Anyway, learning how to create an object like this was interesting. Rather than assemble a comlex object by choosing primitive shapes and plunking them next to each other, you have to start with a simple shape (in my case, a hexagon), and extrude geometrical shapes from the polygons that make up the object.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 10 -- Why Hammer Isn't Good for Fiddly Details or, The Mystery Room Revealed (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

These last few weeks were a bit crazy, so I fell a bit behind in my Half Life 2 modding. Instead, I spent some time working on two different conference proposals that deal with interactive fiction. Oh, and there's the end-of-term rush of students who suddenly want to learn.

Anyway, I've been coyly staying away from what's behind these doors.



In the Cloak of Darkness specification that I'm using (not particularly rigidly) to guide my modding exploration, there's supposed to be a bar to the south of the lobby. The specification doesn't say what the bar looks like, so I figured... what the heck.




Valve's Hammer world editor is actually not the right tool to use in order to create objects with this level of detail. Hammer is no good at curves, or at measurements of less than one inch. There are so many points and lines that make up the bridge consoles, that the tiniest distortion means the edges don't line up.

I spent over a week fixing every single joint and line in the bridge, working from one area and going around clockwise. After several days, I thought I was going crazy, because vertices that I would have sworn I had fixed were suddenly becoming disjointed again.

It turns out that when I made subtle changes in the locations of the vertices, for the rest of that editing session the changes would stick, but when I exited the editor and loaded the file again, the vertices would jump back to where they had been before. If I moved them around significantly, or added a new object, those changes would remain, so I knew it wasn't a problem with simply forgetting to save my work.

Anyway, I wasted nearly a week with that. That's when I realized that, if I wanted to do any kind of detail work, I had to shift over to a 3D modeling tool. Such a tool can create a complex object that can be imported into the Hammer editor. People and detailed props such as weapons or vehicles are created in that manner, while doors, walls, floors, and other simple surfaces are created in the world editor. The captain's chair and the railings look pretty good, since they're all composed of straight lines. But the bridge console chairs and the consoles themselves, which have curves and complex angles, simply weren't working.

Well, I learned something.

When you actually play this game, there's a pulsing red alert light. You can see some of that red in this picture.




I'll probably do something to make it look more like a bar when I get back to working on Cloak of Darkness, but for now my work on the bridge is done. If I ever get to the point where I can create orignal Star Trek NPCs, maybe I'll return to this set. But for now, I'm shifting my attention to the 3D modeling tools, just so I can have some experience creating some softer, curved objects.

That's because the Cloak of Darkness specification requires a cloak, and while I don't think I'm going to be able to make a fully realistic 3D cloth object that drapes over whatever you place it on, at the very least I've got to make a cloak hanging on a hook. I'm a little intimidated by that, and tempted to switch to Inform 7 (text adventure) design for a little while, but we'll see what happens.

It's an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses--if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It's a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite the best efforts of those who avoid it like the plague, MySpace is seeping into the online culture, have a greater influence as the days go by. --Mike Rubino --Crap Blog Junk Design Vomit: Some Thoughts on MySpace Design (Tranquility Lost)

One of my students subtly hints about his atttude towards MySpace.

Blogging Scholarship in a Nutshell (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Earlier today, I was working on three different proposals, all with deadlines today.

Amanda and Karissa stopped by to see how the proposals were doing. I noted that I was madly paring down the word count in order to make the proposals fit the online forms.

Amanda suggested the thesis, "Blogs good."

Karissa offered the antithesis, "Blogs bad."

I then supplied the synthesis: "Blogs OK."

It was a pleasant diversion in a hectic day.

All the proposals are in... and let cyberspace sing them sweetly to their rest.

Executives at DCC Comics have announced the debut of comic-book character Superrman, whose invulnerability to copyediting protects him from nefarious outside forces and intellectual-property lawsuits. "Thrill to the exploits of Superrman, the only child of a doomed plant! Gasp in awe at his Superr-Strength, X-Roy Vision, and his ability to leap mall buildings in a single bounce!" read a press release issued by DCC. "Superrman's only weakness? His vulnerability to Cryptonight -- and his star-crossed love for sassy, sexy, trouble-prone reporter Louis Lane!" The editors of Superrman say the comic book will be released alongside those of other popular DCC characters such as Wander Woman, the Flush, and Batdan. --Comic-Book Superrman Impervious To Copyediting (Onion)

This one's for you, Bobbby.

After one of the most comprehensive studies of the effect on children of the explosion in media choices of the past 15 years, the regulator Ofcom said girls aged 12 to 15 are more likely than boys to have a mobile phone, use the internet, listen to the radio and read newspapers or magazines. Only when it comes to playing computer and console games do boys overtake girls.

Given the historic domination of the home telephone by teenage girls, perhaps it is not surprising they are using the internet to communicate with friends for hours on end. Almost all children between 12 and 15 with the internet at home said they were "confident" surfing the web and did so on average for eight hours a week. But girls are more likely than boys to use the web as a communication tool. --Owen Gibson --More likely to have a mobile, use the net, listen to radio and read papers: it's the girl  (Guardian)

Hey, do you feel your TV is too big? Do you long to combine your television viewing experience with dopey chat-room talk about sex with robots? Is your knowledge of Star Trek so encyclopedic that the term "spoiler" means nothing to you? Then G4 TV has a show for you! --Lore Sjöberg --Trek 2.0, Boldly Going to Hell (Wired)

The background image on my laptop is a graphic of the original Enterprise bridge. But this... this?

When even Wired is mocking Star Trek fans, you know all hope is lost.

Watch the movie first!

Quoth is a dynamic interactive fiction system, in which authoring is done from a player's perspective, from within the running work. Quoth draws upon the concepts of pervasive anthropomorphisation, executable natural language, and revisionist narrative. The major use of Quoth so far has been for musical livecoding.

pervasive anthropomorphisation

In traditional interactive fiction, the player speaks to an ominiscient interpreter. There may be dialogue with "non-player characters", but it is mediated by the interpreter. In Quoth the player is always speaking directly to some item in the universe. The traditional omniscient interpreter is represented by the universe itself.

This allows for each item in the universe to have a different vocabulary, or even a different "interpreter" altogether. It also provides the player with more fluid interaction with each item. --Craig Latta --Quoth: a dynamic interactive fiction system (netjam.org)

Inform 7, or I7, is a dramatic departure from what has come before. IF languages such as Inform 6, TADS, and Hugo are procedural, C-like languages, familiar to most any modern computer programmer. I7 doesn't take that approach. Instead, its language is based on English.

I'll pause a moment to let that sink in.

Rather than using a small set of terse programming directives as Inform 6 did, Inform 7 uses a subset of English, in an effort to make interactive fiction programming more accessible to writers who lack a computer programming background. For instance, the following I7 code creates a three-room house:

The Living Room is a room. "This is your living room, as featured in a number of games written by first-time interactive fiction authors." East is the Kitchen. North is the Bedroom.

I7 also deviates from the standard object-oriented approach to IF, where objects in the game are mapped to objects in code, and the interaction between objects is contained as code associated with the objects. Instead, I7 uses a form of logical programming, where you define rules that explain how the game world works and how objects interact. For example,

Instead of taking the fire, say "It would burn you."

This sets up a rule that, when the player tries to take the fire, they can't; instead, they're told that the fire would burn them. And if you just found yourself thinking, "Well, of course; that's obvious," then you've identified one of the selling points of I7. --Introducing Inform 7 (Brass Lantern)

Such a major shift in the approach to IF programming is going to have repercussions.

While the syntax for I7 is based on English, you still have to think like a programmer in order to code in I7.

However, reading I7 code is much, much easier now. Those who already know how to read code -- and who have internalized coding processes so much that I7 seems like a straitjacket -- probably won't appreciate just how valuable that change is to the general public.

Scott Adams created the first commercial interactive fiction game, and by some accounts the first commercial game of any sort, with his "Adventureland" in 1979.

When he participated in a panel I hosted, he said, "People like [English major] Amanda here, shouldn't have to be a programmer to put into the media her creative thoughts. Today you have to be. Five years? I don't think that will be the case... There will be an underlying tool that you'll be able to use to shape, be creative as you need to. Today, that doesn't exist. It will exist."

He said that on May 3, 2001. http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/adams/qanda2.html

And Inform 7 was officially released on April 30, 2006 -- almost exactly five years later.

A pleasant coincidence.

He was speaking in more general terms of the mod community, but interactive fiction is a very mature mod community -- one that has sustained a whole genre long past the point where it is commercially viable. This is a good thing, because for a decade we've seen what tremendously creative things people can do when they get their hands on these tools.

You no longer need to be a programmer to write text adventure games. Graham Nelson and an army of collaborators have made game creation into just another form of composition.

We're still a long way from a vision of the Holodeck, where Geordie can say, "Computer, create an original Sherlock Holmes mystery with an opponent capable of defeating Data" (not the exact quote -- working from memory here.... but see this interesting article likening TNG's holodeck to the genre of the masque. http://faculty.gvsu.edu/royerd/courses/495/masque.htm

I don't often get this excited and make wild predictions. But that sound I hear... could it be the footsteps of Janet Murray's cyberbard, some rough beast now armed with Inform 7, and slouching towards cyberspace to be born?