PopCult: April 2007 Archive Page

I can't hear you, Bert. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I walk into my classroom about two minutes before class starts. It's a great hybrid room, with 24 workstations around the outer edges, tables in the middle, and a huge projection screen up front.

As usual, a few students who aren't in my class are using the computers. Some have obviously just come into the room and are just logging on.

"A class is about to start now," I say to a group of students. The students start to pack up.

One student in another corner of the room has headphones on, and I can hear his music blasting from across the room. I walk towards him.

"A class is about to start now," I say.

He does not hear.

I walk over to him.

"A class is about to start now!" I say, louder.

He does not respond.

I stand very close to him, and this time he looks up.

"A class is about to start now!!" I say, even louder.

"What??" he says.

"Number one, your music is rather loud, and number two, a class is about to start now!"

"When is the class going to start?" he says, looking around for a clock.

"Now!!"

But of course, by this time he has finally turned down the volume.

"You didn't have to come at me so hard!" he grumbles, annoyed and offended, and ready to defend his turf.

From his perspective, I came up to him and yelled at him... but of course the only reason I was speaking loudly was because he couldn't hear me when I talked normally.

Even though I was annoyed, part of me wanted to laugh, since I couldn't help thinking of Ernie and Bert doing the "You've got a banana in our your ear" sketch.

I'm sure that fellow found another lab in the building, and although I prefer to start class without fighting battles first, life goes on. Maybe I'll just make a mental note to get to class a little earlier next time, so I have time to clear out the room with less fuss.

Contestants had to stand with their hands behind their backs until a bell sounded and a message appeared on an overhead screen. The winner was judged on whoever's message -- checked for exact punctuation -- reached the judges first.

The text tests ranged from "faster than a speeding bullet..." and "what we do in life echoes in eternity" to the less poetic "OMG, nd 2 talk asap," which for those over 30 means "Oh my God, need to talk as soon as possible." --FYI, 13yo skool grl is nu US txt mssg chmpN (Yahoo! AFP (will expire))

The first issue was providing enough fun. Every puzzle should have some reward, and a complicated or multi-stage puzzle should provide some minor rewards for partial solutions. So once I had the puzzle structure in mind (more about that later), I could see which puzzles were going to open a lot of new game-play and which were only going to bring the player up against another puzzle -- the structural equivalent of getting through one locked door to find that there's another beyond it. Everywhere there was a puzzle without much game-play reward, I added plot material for the player to discover instead -- ideally, a hint that raised more questions than it answered, something that would both reward him for getting part-way through the puzzle sequence and keep him interested in what would turn up next.

The other point had to do with managing player attention. The more time a player spends in the presence of an unsolvable puzzle (say, a door he can see from the first room but that stays locked until half-way through the game), the more importance he tends to attach to that problem. It's a huge let-down to walk through that door and find that it leads to a broom closet with one cheap treasure in it. So the big puzzles, the puzzles the player has been taught to care about, should pay off in multiple ways at once: *both* major new game-play *and* major plot information. --Emily Short interviewed by Jim Munroe --Inside Interactive Fiction: An Interview with Emily Short (Gamasutra)

Perhaps the only thing that could have made this movie better would have been if Xerces, the God-king of the Persian army, had been played by John Stamos, the actor who played Uncle Jesse on Full House. Even the Spartans would have cowered beneath his seductive gaze and shining, well-combed hair.

[...]

Not only did I leave the theater feeling like I had gotten my $8 worth, I left wanting to go outside, rip up a sign post and throw it through my friends chest. --Paul Crossman --300 spears reviewer's attention (Setonian)

These lines gave me a good laugh. (Missing an apostrophe on "friend's", but otherwise well done.)