October 2007 Archive Page

...did they steal candy from me while I wasn't looking, and stuff the empty wrappers into their pockets?

If they did, they certainly didn't confess on their blogs.

Next Generation:

"The game begins with Bart wanting to play a game called Grand Theft Scratchy. Of course this is a parody of Grand Theft Auto. And Marge immediately takes it away from him. She tries to clean up the town and stop the game from being distributed in Springfield because Marge is against video game violence. She uses horrific violence to stop video game violence... in a video game... That's called irony. The people who make Grand Theft Auto - they spazzed out like little babies."

The New York Times has published more details about Google's plans to compete with Facebook:

On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google's social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.

The strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook, which last spring opened its service to outside developers. Since then, more than 5,000 small programs have been built to run on the Facebook site, and some have been adopted by millions of the site's users. Most of those programs tap into connections among Facebook friends and spread themselves through those connections, as well as through a "news feed" that alerts Facebook users about what their friends are doing.

In a corner of the living room between the couch and the video tape cabinet, my kids keep a huge stash of paper towel rolls, which they use to stage epic battles.

The Cardboard Tube Fighting League website is annoying since it's mostly made up images... I didn't find any text that I could copy and paste here.

Ear Studio:

Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to parse the daily output of the paper (news, features, editorials) and the archives, as well as the activity of visitors to NYTimes.com (browsing, searching, commenting). The resulting refracted view of The Times will be displayed on 560 vacuum-fluorescent display screens installed in the lobby.

Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands.

The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, "In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind." President George W. Bush addressed the issue in his 2006 State of the Union address. "We need to encourage children to take more math and science, and to make sure those courses are rigorous enough to compete with other nations," he said.

Salzman and Lowell found the reverse was true. Their report shows U.S. student performance has steadily improved over time in math, science, and reading. It also found enrollment in math and science courses is actually up. For example, in 1982 high school graduates earned 2.6 math credits and 2.2 science credits on average. By 1998, the average number of credits increased to 3.5 math and 3.2 science credits. The percent of students taking chemistry increased from 45% in 1990 to 55% in 1996 and 60% in 2004. Scores in national tests such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the SAT, and the ACT have also shown increases in math scores over the past two decades.

Structure, Sign, and Play

An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida

"There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: "Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an 'event', if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect."

The concept is clever, though the implementation is a bit shaky... for example, one room mentions a spiral staircase, but when you type "climb staircase" the game says "You don't see any such thing."

What if FEMA gave a press conference, and nobody (but FEMA) came? FEMA employees lobbed softball questions during a staged media event. Reuters:

No actual reporter attended the news conference in person, agency spokesman Aaron Walker said.

A spokeswoman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has authority over FEMA, called the incident "inexcusable and offensive to the secretary."

"We have made it clear that stunts such as this will not be tolerated or repeated," spokeswoman Laura Keehner said. She said the department was looking at the possibility of reprimanding those responsible.

The agency had called the briefing with about 15 minutes notice as federal officials headed for southern California to oversee and assist in firefighting and rescue efforts. Reporters were also given a telephone number to listen in on but could not ask questions.

In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention:

In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities' Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with an adviser charged by the administration to actively screen all content), to an educational model (with an adviser that helps guide content but with student editors making nearly all of the decisions), to complete independence. "Whatever the rules are, know what they are," Mattingly advised the students in the audience, stressing the need to know how the rules apply when it comes down to the "moment it's a really bad story -- which at Christian colleges means sex, drugs or donors."

The student paper at Seton Hill follows the educational model. If the paper got into the habit of publishing shoddily-written and poorly-researched attacks on the administration, my role would be to correct the shoddy journalism, rather than adjust the anti-administrative slant. I'd be just as critical of students who turned the paper into a cheerleading section, if they were too timid to go after the hard news stories that might make some groups on campus unhappy. 

Good journalism will sometimes make certain groups unhappy, and those groups can and will complain, which is why I tell my students their research has to hold up under scrutiny. Because Seton Hill is a private institution, articles the Setonian publishes are not protected by the First Amendment.  But as long as a contested story is fair -- for instance, student gripes are presented alongside official responses, and the story does not include libel or a violation of privacy rights -- then a request to remove or censor a story becomes an issue of academic freedom. I cannot teach journalism unless students have the freedom to make their own editorial judgments. On the few occasions when SHU employees have panicked and asked me to intervene and remove or prevent a story, the academic dean has been very supportive of my position.

Via Bloomberg:

James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA's molecular structure, said he plans to retire immediately as chancellor of New York's Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory amid a controversy over racial remarks. The lab suspended Watson from his position earlier this month after he questioned the intelligence of Africans during a book tour. Watson announced his decision to retire in an e-mail, which said he would also leave the lab's board.

I've blogged about Watson before.

Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I'm planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I'm sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about the course that are likely to remain essentially the same. Video Game Culture and Theory: Course Objectives (2006)

Your objectives for this course are to

• explore definitions of important concepts such as game and fun
• learn about the origins and historical development of video games,
• expose yourself to a broad range of games,
• gain experience recognizing and interpreting basic game elements (goal, risk, fiction, emotional engagement, rules, outcome, values, consequences, close playing, etc.),
• develop an awareness of the complex cultural context within which games exist (children's culture, geek culture, women's issues, political issues, economic issues, aesthetic issues, etc.),
• and ultimately, to discern the core cultural values represented in a particular game.

To that end, you will:

• play several games on the syllabus, read three books and additional shorter articles as assigned,
• complete quizzes and exercises to ensure that you are keeping up with the readings and to evaluate your progress,
• participate regularly in classroom and web-based discussions, and
• write a formal research paper (minimum 10 pages).

Neither ability to "win" a game nor programming/design talents are germane to the subject of this course. At the end of this course, you should be able to

1. Demonstrate competence in the critical reading of complex cultural texts (including games, cultural responses to games, and the academic study of games)
2. Engage intellectually and respectfully with your peers (in person and online)
3. Write a college-level paper that appropriately uses primary and secondary sources to defend a non-obvious claim (without minimizing or neglecting opposing or alternative views)

This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention.

There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game 'Adventure!' to include Booth as the lead antagonist.

Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he's really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since people usually search for concrete nouns, rather than verbs, it makes sense to get those content keywords in a prominent place.

Words are usually the main moneymakers on a website. Selecting the first 2 words for your page titles is probably the highest-impact ROI-boosting design decision you make in a Web project. Front-loading important keywords trumps most other design considerations. Writing the first 2 words of summaries runs a close second.

Nielsen got plenty of attention for this claim, but it's a bait-and-switch. Passive sentences are not the only way, or even a particularly good way, of getting subject words to the beginning of web headings.  Consider "Passive Voice Can Boost ROI in Web Headings," or "Passive Voice: Surprisingly Useful in Web Headings." 

Also I cringed at one of Nielsen's examples of a good, scanning-friendly use of the passive voice: "13 design guidelines for tab controls are all followed by Yahoo Finance, but usability suffers due to AJAX overkill and difficult customization."  If somebody alphabetizes all the page titles on a website, that page is going to be alphabetized under "13."  

Professional writers know that the most meaningful part of a sentence comes at the end, when you're setting up for the idea that follows.  So the most significant part of this particular sentence is not that 13 design guidelines for tab controls were followed, but rather that other design choices hurt the site's usability.

For the past year or so, my main job in our homeschooling family has been to teach Carolyn (5) how to read. Now I've picked up the task of teaching Peter (9) computer programming.  Last week I wrote a few simple BASIC programs to teach a very basic concept that some of my college students have trouble with when I teach interactive fiction programming -- the fact that when you write code, you have several different audiences -- not just the computer, but the user and also yourself (or some other programmer who inherits your code).

Last week we did a quick-and-dirty choose-your-own-adventure story, and showed Peter how to copy-and-paste blocks of code for editing, rather than retyping long sequences all at once. Several times I made a deliberate mistake, and pretended that I didn't know how to fix it. Peter picked it up quickly.  He was not so good at picking out problems such as missing punctuation or the difference between spaces and underscore_characters, so it was slow going at first.

I do plan on beginning each coding session with a little bit of text-based BASIC coding, but he has started saying, "Daddy, is this enough? Can we move on to Scratch now?"

Scratch is a wonderful 2D animation environment that is designed to introduce kids to programming concepts.  Think of it as Flash for kids. Each element of the programming syntax (an if/then statement or a repeat loop) is graphically represented like a puzzle piece, and the various elements of the program snap into the blocks, giving a tremendously satisfying visual feedback when the programming syntax works.  You'll never see an "error" message when you are working with Scratch -- the pieces just won't fit together if they don't go together. Instead of the "alpha" value, graphics have a "ghost" value, which is a far more sensible name. (I remember being very frustrated when I first started experimenting with creating textures for 3D games, because none of the tutorials I could find bothered to define such a basic term.)

Adding considerably to the charm factor is this collection of kid-produced Scratch tutorials that teach basic Scratch concepts. I downloaded one to see what it was like, and I downloaded a few more just because I think it's cute to hear the kids narrate the tutorials.

Students at Expo were beta testers for a new programming software called Scratch. Designed specifically for youth, it allows them to create their own stories, animations, fames, music and art. At the same time, they apply math concepts, design, problem solve and collaborate. To learn more about Scratch or download the program yourself, go to . One of our writing standards is to explain how to do something. We had so much fun with the Scratch program that we decided to make computer tutorials so others could learn the basics, too. Click on a link to see what you can do with Scratch!

Greg Beato, from Reason Magazine

Online it attracts more than 2 million readers a week. Type onion into Google, and The Onion pops up first. Type the into Google, and The Onion pops up first.

But type "best practices for newspapers" into Google, and The Onion is nowhere to be found. Maybe it should be. At a time when traditional newspapers are frantic to divest themselves of their newsy, papery legacies, The Onion takes a surprisingly conservative approach to innovation. As much as it has used and benefited from the Web, it owes much of its success to low-tech attributes readily available to any paper but nonetheless in short supply: candor, irreverence, and a willingness to offend.

While other newspapers desperately add gardening sections, ask readers to share their favorite bratwurst recipes, or throw their staffers to ravenous packs of bloggers for online question-and-answer sessions, The Onion has focused on reporting the news. The fake news, sure, but still the news. It doesn't ask readers to post their comments at the end of stories, allow them to rate stories on a scale of one to five, or encourage citizen-satire. It makes no effort to convince readers that it really does understand their needs and exists only to serve them. The Onion's journalists concentrate on writing stories and then getting them out there in a variety of formats, and this relatively old-fashioned approach to newspapering has been tremendously successful.

Invisible Games:

The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers' children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime early in 1877. The telegraph traffic of dairymen and the odd dentist was low, however, and Oskar had little to do. In his boredom, he reached out across the wires.

[...]

The quiet telegraph upon which so much depended read as follows:

"I am alne. North-fire. South-water. East-earth. West-Air. Cme, fnd me. Execute."

Curiously, when the corresponding Phelps Machine's keys were depressed, a melancholy little melody emerged. The song echoed through Baxter Hobshack's office, and through trial and error, the asthmatic operator managed to return:

"I am cming. Head East in the evening."

Thus began the game of Karolson and Hobshack, in which Hobshack was led through a simple, charming world of Karolson's imagination.

And, yes, I admit, before I blogged this I googled Karolson and Hobshack -- just in case I had actually missed something. Almost as charming is the equally whimsical account of the origin of the Simon game.

Utterly pointless, and at the same time completely brilliant. You can only eat a few spoonfuls of cereal at a time, so why not keep most of the bowl dry, and soak only a few bites at a time? From eatmecrunchy.com.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun prints an assessment of the function of text in recent computer games. Some good discussion of the effect of talking movies, the fact that having good voice actors means you don't need to write as much dialog (which is a good thing since recording dialog is much more expensive than writing text) and some interesting predictions about the future of text in computer games. (IF authors Emily Short and Adam Cadre are quoted, and Graham Nelson is referenced.)

And the merits of the text adventure remain. They simply weren't necessarily supplanted by necessarily better technology - just more populist, accessible ones. "There's a great deal of beauty to be found in verbal expression," notes Emily Short, IF author of critically acclaimed games like Floatpoint, Galatea and Savoir-Faire, "This sounds trivial, I know, but many of the IF pieces I like, I like for the writing: the rhythm of the prose, the attitude of the narrator, the wit or grace of the phrasing." Having text as your only medium also changes the sort of experiences you make. "There are things you can write that you can't draw effectively," Emily adds, "The reverse is also true, of course: graphics are superior at conveying spatial relationships, color and light, a sense of scale. But words are better at showing the subjective and the internal. It's hard to draw into a picture what the viewpoint character feels about what he sees; it's much easier to imply in a verbal description." There's even simple utilitarian uses to text in play. "Words are handy for highlighting only the important aspects of a scene, and downplaying the unimportant ones," Emily adds, "In a text game you can say "There's something glinting under the water", and the player knows 1) that there's something there he should be thinking about and 2) that he's not expected to know exactly what it is yet. I've played a few graphical games where I was scratching my head trying to figure out what a pictured object was".

From Language Log:

Much of the blame for the public's poor understanding of science must go to a little studied but culturally pivotal genre: news report headlines. Short snappy headlines provide the lazy reader with just enough information to totally misconstrue a story.

There's a reason why the writing in newspapers doesn't look like the writing found in scientific journals. 

Newspaper readers have needs and values that differ from the those of the scientific community. Scientists require a huge level of precision in order to get their jobs done, and they are used to writing for other scientists (or perhaps college students who want to be scientists).  The documents that scientists point to as examples of clear, accurate writing presume an incredible amount of prior knowledge -- not just vocabulary words and factual knowledge, but abstract concepts like the scientific method and the relationship between applied and theoretical research.  Science papers are almost completely devoid of verbs other than "is," and science papers are almost all credited to large groups of participants (even though only a small number of participants will actually have helped write the document that bears their name).  I don't note these points in order to complain -- these are just features of the scientific world.

But science is a vast subject.  While a nuclear physicist might have a good sense of whether a particular animal study experiment is well-designed, the nuclear physicist might be unable to assess the significance of this or that particular animal behavioral observation.  So while scientists rely on their own specialized genres in order to communicate with others within their specialty, even a trained scientist must rely on a good science writer to produce generally-accessible representations of knowledge generated in distant scientific fields.

I used to write for an engineering newsletter, and I saw first-hand that few scientists are gifted with the ability to explain their work in terms that Joe Sixpack can understand. Back in 1992, when virtual reality was all the rage, I interviewed Randy Pausch, the CMU professor who recently became famous for giving an inspiring talk about how he is facing his impending death. But few people of any profession share Pausch's ability to communicate. 

Often, then, the journalists are often on their own when it comes to translating a two hours of academic rambling into an 800-word news feature that attempts to make the latest scientific discovery seem relevant to the average reader. 

But Language Log's complaint about headlines highlights another problem. Reporters generally don't write their own headlines.  For large papers, there might be a sub-editor whose job is to write all the headlines, but for middle-sized papers, the layout artists are the ones with control over the page.  They may scan the article quickly and come up with a headline that fits -- both in the sense of being appropriate to the topic, and also that fills the given amount of space.  When a story is sent out over wire services, so that hundreds of regional and local papers can reprint it, each paper will probably reprint it with a slightly different layout, meaning that the headline might need to be longer or shorter to fill the given space.

So, even if science reporters meticulously research an article, and check to make sure that their own original editors don't give the piece an inaccurate headline, once that story gets syndicated, the author has no control over the headline that will appear above the story.

Journalists have to write for a general audience, and news articles tend to simplify in order to make complex subtle points seem interesting and relevant to the general reader. A reporter who is writing on a deadline is far more likely to call up an expert on the phone and get some quick quotes than to sort through scientific studies that were written for an expert audience that does not include journalists.  Even journalists who specialize in science reporting may find themselves writing about astrophysics in the morning, human cell biology in the afternoon, and plate tectonics the next morning.

I just started a unit on science reporting in my introductory news writing class.  Tomorrow we'll start discussing It Ain't Necessarily So (which offers numerous case studies of incidents in which the media have distorted the public perception of science by latching onto a partial truth, sensationalizing, and/or editorializing).  Yesterday I invited SHU math professor Josh Sasmor to speak to my class yesterday. His final take-home message was that reporters have an obligations to be critical of the statistical evidence handed to them by their sources. (He said they should take each statistic with "that much salt," miming a something the shape of a salt lick.)

....he looks through the kitchen window and exclaims, "Woah! Those leaves are falling onto the trampoline like Confederate shells on Ft. Sumter in 1861!"

(Some context... he hates the fact that leaves get inside the trampoline net, and will furiously throw them out one at a time, guarding the perimeter when he is outside playing.)

A brief MacWord item on Facebook security changes:

Facebook users can now report complaints about pornography, harassment or inappropriate contact either by clicking on links on the Web site or by sending email to the abuse@facebook.com address. The company will respond to these complaints within 24 hours, and it will allow an independent examiner appointed with the approval of the New York AG, to monitor the company's compliance for the next two years.

Sounds like Facebook is doing a good job acting on complaints from the wider community (that is, legislators and parents). Thanks for the link, Karissa.

Bill "Calvin and Hobbes" Watterson reviews the new Charles "Peanuts" Schultz biography in the Wall Street Journal.

Lucy, for all her domineering and insensitivity, is ultimately a tragic, vulnerable figure in her pursuit of Schroeder. Schroeder's commitment to Beethoven makes her love irrelevant to his life. Schroeder is oblivious not only to her attentions but also to the fact that his musical genius is performed on a child's toy (not unlike a serious artist drawing a comic strip). Schroeder's fanaticism is ludicrous, and Lucy's love is wasted. Schulz illustrates the conflict in his life, not in a self-justifying or vengeful manner but with a larger human understanding that implicates himself in the sad comedy. I think that's a wonderfully sane way to process a hurtful world. Of course, his readers connected to precisely this emotional depth in the strip, without ever knowing the intimate sources of certain themes. Whatever his failings as a person, Schulz's cartoons had real heart.

The Associated Press and other news syndicates have long made spot news articles generated by local newspapers, available to other publications. Now the NY Times is reporting on a new outlet that will provide original investigative journalism.

As struggling newspapers across the country cut back on investigative reporting, a new kind of journalism venture is hoping to fill the gap.

Paul E. Steiger, who was the top editor of The Wall Street Journal for 16 years, and a pair of wealthy Californians are assembling a group of investigative journalists who will give away their work to media outlets.

The nonprofit group, called Pro Publica, will pitch each project to a newspaper or magazine (and occasionally to other media) where the group hopes the work will make the strongest impression. The plan is to do long-term projects, uncovering misdeeds in government, business and organizations.

Nothing quite like it has been attempted, and despite having a lot going for it, Pro Publica will be something of an experiment, inventing its practices by trial and error. It remains to be seen how well it can attract talent and win the cooperation of the mainstream media.

Blogcosm offers a good round-up of online reaction to a NIH agency's not-so-useful method of citing a weblog.

Several bloggers noticed yesterday that the US National Library of Medicine (NLM, which is part of the NIH: National Institutes of Health) has a style guide for citing blogs... The NLM's definition of a blog isn't bad... But the guide itself is several years late and still flawed.

TiddlyWiki is a complete wiki in a single HTML file. It contains the entire text of the wiki, and all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML goodness to be able to display it, and let you edit it or search it. Without needing a server.

I played with TiddyWiki a bit, but wasn't able to edit the pages in my browser, as promised. Perhaps the ad-blocker or some security feature on my browser is interfering with the operations. I'm blogging this so I can go back to it later.

Michael J. Roberts, creator of the TADS interactive fiction system, offers a thoughtful reflection on contemporary interactive fiction. Yes, nostalgia is part of the reason why some people like interactive fiction...

But for many of us, that's not it at all; there's a lot more to IF than fond memories of classic games on antique computers. Many of us see text-based interactive fiction as a uniquely expressive story-telling medium. To us, text is not the same as really lame graphics - it's an altogether different medium with altogether different capabilities, and it didn't become obsolete when graphical games came along any more than books became obsolete when television was invented.

What is it about interactive fiction that keeps us enthusiasts interested after all these years?

For starters, IF is probably the only computer game medium in which an individual author can hope to create an entire work on his or her own. Part of the reason today's cutting-edge computer games are so technically accomplished is that they're created by huge teams of specialists. Without millions of dollars of financial backing, someone with an idea for a game has little hope of realizing it as a full graphical production. In contrast, a lone writer can readily create an entire text game single-handedly.

Probably the most interesting thing about IF, though, is its inherent emphasis on story.

I got an e-mail this morning from a multimedia developer who found my online version of Emily Short's Metamorphoses, asking some technical questions about whether it is possible to give web-based users tasks to perform in an interactive fiction game, and have the game notify the outside world when the task is completed. I'm reproducing it here with permission.

Dennis,

Hi. I write with something of a request. I wonder if you can help?

I've been able to find one of Emily Short's IF stories playing within a web page on your site <http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery.metamorp/index.html>. This is the only time I've been able to find IF playing this way - most IF seems to get played as a self-standing application - and so I wondered if you might be able to give me some idea about how the web-based IF is accomplished?

As an old (in both senses of the word) player of IF, and now a self-professed multimedia developer, I am trying to see if I can use INFORM7 to write some "tasks" for users of a web-based 'community' site that I'm working with. The idea would be bring up a short IF task as an alternative activity for a user who requests one, on the  

web page, get the user to work through it, and get the story to send a message to the web server on successful completion (or on saving, etc.).

If you have time to reply, and if you can help, I would be most grateful.

Regards,

Denis Williamson

Hong Kong

I'm posting my response here, in the hopes that anyone with a better answer will share it.

The Inform system produces game files that run on the Z-machine, which is a virtual machine that exists only in software. When you see an IF game running in a web page, it is probably using Matthew Russoto's ZPlet, which is a Java interpreter for the Z-machine.  I wouldn't know how it is possible to send a message from within the virtual machine to the outside world, but my programming skills are very modest, so just because I can't imagine how to do it doesn't mean it's impossible.  I don't know all that much about the Z machine -- Andrew Plotkin or Matthew Russoto would be the ones to ask (both of whom read the rec.arts.int-fiction Usenet group).

It should be a fairly trivial thing to have a small stand-alone ZPlet program that ends with the player finding a magic word, which the user would then just manually key into some other program.  I embedded a few small IF programs in a web page designed to teach my students about exposition in interactive fiction -- that might give you some idea of what you can accomplish. I don't try to communicate to the outside world from within the sample games, but there is some crude interaction (in in the form of questions the web site asks about the in-game experience.)

The Glulx interpreter has some significant multimedia capability, and there is a Java interpreter for Glulx, Zag, by Jon Alfred Zeppeiri. Inform 7 can output gamefiles in the Glulx format.  (It requires the Java Runtime environment to be installed on your local computer, so it's not as point-and-click simple as ZPlet.)

TADS also has some multimedia capabilities, but it is a completely different system from Inform and I have not recently checked out its capabilities. It has had HTML hyperlinking for some time, so I imagine it should not be too hard to send a message to the outside world.

The website Homestarrunner.com created a flash-based spoof of text adventures called Thy Dungeonman. I don't know whether the flash code has been released, or whether some other text-adventure fan might have released a homebrew version of the code. But that game was released long before Inform 7, so my guess is the creation of such a flash-based game would be hackish.

I just Googled and found Flashonate, a flash-based z-machine interpreter, by Peter Rogers. He has released the code as GPL.

I hope you will share whatever you learn as you investigate the possibilities.

Update: I posted the question to rec.arts.int-fiction, where the IF gurus are.

Josh Olsson relates a fascinating tale of internet deception in the LA Weekly.

"Audrey, this is Harlan Ellison. It's imperative that I talk to you and Tania as soon as possible about Josh. I'm very worried. Tania's on her way to your house right now, and I'd like the two of you to come here."

Audrey asks if she can bring her friend Janna, and Harlan says no.

Audrey asks if she can bring her new puppy, and Harlan says no. You don't argue with Harlan Ellison; she says yes.

A project called StupidFilter is trying to weed out stupid internet comments. Hoax? At any rate, it's amusing.

Do you really expect to be able to detect and filter anything that's conceivably stupid?

No, of course not. You'd need real AI for that, and beyond a certain point it's simply subjective; after all, a sufficiently advanced AI would probably filter out the whole of human discourse, which isn't the idea.

So what do you plan to filter?

The idea is that the most egregiously stupid comments will also be the easiest to detect while remaining ignorant of context; comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of "LOL," exclamation points, and so on.

How do you rate stupidity?

Since we're trying to build a detailed database that serves as a very verbose example of What Not To Do, we look for comments whose prose style we can point to and say, "I don't even have to understand the content of this comment to know that it's stupid," -- based on the gross prose style alone, its stupidity is self-evident. It is then useful as an example for our parser to integrate into its database of stupidity.

Newsweek:

The assumption that all videogames are toys for children rather than entertainment for a variety of different audiences is one of our pet peeves. It may seem innocuous, but it's not only the foundation of continued attempts at the state and national level to regulate the sale and marketing of videogames, it's also an excuse for developers and publishers to coast on the innocuous, the inoffensive and the tried-and-true rather than push the medium forward in multiple directions for multiple audiences--including adults. In other words, it's not just videogame outsiders who hold this belief: many insiders do as well.

Wired's gaming blog ponders how one might play an official The Princess Bride game.

Will you have to defend yourself against ROUSes? Perhaps duel against the six-fingered man? Maybe if you collect a certain number of buttercups you unlock a mini game where you have to figure out what the hell Fezzick is saying. We'll see, I suppose.

Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don't make your peer feel very sad.)

In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise your paper (and perhaps raise your final grade). But for me, the real value of the exercise is that the experience of hunting for and fixing problems in a peer's paper will help you develop self-editing skills that you can apply to any writing situation.  ("Newswriting Peer Review Guidelines.")

After I teach a subject for the third time, I know enough of what to expect that I can start writing a detailed handout that encapsulates the lesson, so that when I teach the classes in future years, I can reduce the amount of class time I spend lecturing on a subject, and instead refer students to the handout as part of the preparation for a workshop. I don't generally use handouts as a replacement for classroom instruction, but when the handout is a detailed checklist, that can really help students as they revise.

I feel a sense of accomplishment getting this handout posted, since I managed to get it to the students in time for it to be useful.  The revision of the first full-length news article is due Friday, so I'll have something substantial to evaluate before midterm grades are due next week; students will be able to revise again (if they wish) after the break. 

The stress level always goes up before midterms, but I'm feeling better than I've felt in weeks -- the pneumonia that laid me flat is finally tolerable, to the point where I'm well enough to feel guilty about all the tasks I permitted myself to put off while I was sick.  Tomorrow I'll turn 39, and I'll spend most of the day grading papers. Such is life.

A Yahoo! developer reflects on the missed opportunities caused by the economic demands of the recording industry:

If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I'm not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I'll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won't let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don't have any more time to give and can't bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life's too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out. If, on the other hand, you've seen the light too, there's a very fun road ahead for us all. Lets get beyond talking about how you get the music and into building context: reasons and ways to experience the music. The opportunity is in the chasm between the way we experience the content and the incredible user-created context of the Web.

Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys

Reporting -- especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press -- is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can't figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the Web, and fewer and fewer Americans care about current events and the world outside their own skulls. But the other part of the problem is that Generation Download thinks information wants to be free, everywhere and always, even if some ink-stained wretch wept tears of blood to create it.

Lawrence Lessig talks a good game, but I still don't understand how people who live and die by their intellectual property survive the obsolescence of copyright and the transition to the gift economy of our dreams.

New York Times:

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo -- despite its "thou shalt kill" credo -- celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Inside Higher Ed:

Virtually all college students come to campus with their own cell phones, but for privacy reasons, telecommunications companies require their subscribers to manually opt in to any mass alert service. The result is that in many cases, the primary obstacle to widespread campus access to text alerts is the students themselves.

CNN/AP

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food.

But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix's job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix "acts as a good safe house for bacteria," said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. Its location _ just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac -- helps support the theory, he said.

From the New Yorker:

It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo's time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid--our word "galaxy" comes from the Greek for milk--and it was so bright that it cast shadows on the ground (as did Jupiter and Venus). Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name.

The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead--a phenomenon called "sky glow." Anyone who has flown across the country on a clear night has seen the landscape ablaze with artificial lights, especially in urban areas. Today, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars--less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope.

The Denver Post:

The Colorado State University editor who used the F-word in the student newspaper will keep his job.

My biggest reaction to the editorial was not simply that it used the F-word, it's that the editorial was so poorly framed -- it consisted entirely of four words, "Taser this ... F*** BUSH."  I'm sure the phrasing was simply intended to be topical, but it nevertheless seems to suggest that Bush was somehow responsible for the recent incident in which security guards used a Taser on a student who disrupted a speech by John Kerry. There are plenty of less sloppy, more coherent ways to make a statement about politics. 

I feel for the other students who lost their jobs after the paper lost advertising income over the incident, and I don't think McSwane showed good judgment, but the whole point of having a student paper is to give students the opportunity to make decisions on their own, and to take responsibility for those decisions. McSwane and his staff have certainly had the opportunity to learn from the experience.

While doing some advanced preparation for an upcoming unit on statistics in my news writing class, I learned something new today (from Wikipedia).  When coming across a statistic that looks like slam-dunk evidence of bias or wrongdoing, an activist will have a motivation to present that data to journalists in order to advance a particular perspective. The problem comes when the well-meaning activist does not really understand statistics, and so presents an inaccurate interpretation to a journalist. It's the journalist's obligation to check out any statistic he or she uses in a story, often by contacting an expert who is not directly connected with whatever research is being cited, so that the expert can offer an independent interpretation of the data.

One of the best known real life examples of Simpson's paradox occurred when the University of California, Berkeley was sued for bias against women applying to graduate school. The admission figures for fall 1973 showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted, and the difference was so large that it was unlikely to be due to chance.^[16][3]

	Applicants	% admitted
Men	8442	44%
Women	4321	35%

However when examining the individual departments, it was found that no department was significantly biased against women; in fact, most departments had a small bias against men.

Major	Men		Women
	Applicants	% admitted	Applicants	% admitted
A	825	62%	108	82%
B	560	63%	25	68%
C	325	37%	593	34%
D	417	33%	375	35%
E	191	28%	393	24%
F	272	6%	341	7%

The explanation turned out to be that women tended to apply to departments with low rates of admission, while men tended to apply to departments with high rates of admission. The conditions under which department-specific frequency data constitute a proper defense against charges of discrimination are formulated in Pearl (2000).

Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts!

I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in college because I would learn everything I needed to know my first six months in entertainment. Taking this advice to heart, I chose to major in Archaeology.

While I continued to study programming and art in college, auditing a class in C and taking more art history classes, the archaeology emphasis has had the greatest influence on me. Combining soft knowledge like art, history, and mythology spanning the globe, with hard knowledge like biology, statistical analysis, economics, and urban planning has helped me the most in my game career.

The New Yorker has an article about a bookstore that supplies custom-made libraries for purchase or, for comercial displays and movie sets, rental.

Although prop books are meant to be seen and not read, they have to evoke a mise en scène, inside and out. For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover such topics as paleontology, marine biology, and pre-Columbian society. They had to be in muted colors and predate 1957. "People have gotten so character-specific nowadays," Jenny McKibben, a manager at the store, said. "It can't just be color anymore. With high-def, they can just freeze the film and say, 'Oh, that's so inappropriate.' "

I created a new handout that focuses on the efficient use of quoted material in MLA-style papers. Some of this material used to be part of a more general handout on using sources, but I think it will be more useful if I pull it out and create a new handout.

An MLA-style paper does not ask you to give the full name and credentials of your sources in the body of your paper, or even the full title of your source. (Save that information for the Works Cited list.)

In high school, where you might write a whole paper using only one or two sources, you got points for calling attention to the fact that you found a good source and were able to use it successfully in a paper. But in a paper you write for college, you may use three or four different sources in the same paragraph, and you may refer to several additional sources without actually quoting from them. If you bring your essay to a screeching halt in order to introduce the full name and credentials of each author, you will bury whatever argument you were trying to make.

Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like.

Engadget:

That's right, the first 2600 units rolled off the assembly line in October of 1977, delighting both children and kids at heart with games like Pitfall and Pole Position, and helping distract the nation after the untimely death of the King, the tragic crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane, and Pele's retirement. So here's to you, dear 2600: Atari may only be a shadow of its former self today, but you've lived on in our fond memories,

Space.com:

Fifty years ago this week, Sputnik Chief Designer Sergei Korolyov watched as a modified Russian missile launched into space from Kazakhstan's lonely steppes carrying a very special payload. Sputnik 1 ("traveling companion" in Russian) was about the size of a basketball and weighed about 180 pounds. It was equipped with two radio transmitters and four long antennas that broadcasted a constant beep while circling the Earth for 21 days.