History: August 2008 Archive Page

If my old shoebox of Meego Star Trek action figures turns up, I'll consider myself very happy. Seton Hill's librarian, David Stanley, reports an even more significant historical find. From the Reeves Library blog.

Kelly Addleman, our public services librarian, received an email from a researcher in Germany who has been making a survey of the illumination appearing in early bibles published by Anton Koberger. Well, it turns out that we have one in our possession. We own a Biblia Latina which was published in 1478. The illuminations are so beautiful that I thought I would share some with you. I am also including a letter that establishes its provenance.

I've cropped part of the letter (apparently written about 60 years ago).  Click the image for a slight enlargement, or see the full original.

From the BBC... thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local celebrities.

"It's odd, standing here in the same area where my ancestors were buried. I felt really strange when I had the bones, the skull of my great-great-great grandfather dating back 120 generations, in my hands," said Manfred.

It's hard to believe that the word "hello" entered common discourse so recently, and that an inventor suggested it in a conscious attempt to develop a protocol for using the telephone. (Wired, apparently borrowing heavily from Wikipedia.)

Bell's famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone -- "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." -- were delivered without any greeting at all.

When he did weigh in on the subject, Bell proposed using "ahoy, ahoy," the age-old seafarer's hail. And, in fact, ahoy was the first greeting used, until Edison suggested hello.

Mark Bruno offers his version of the "Remember text adventure games? People are not only still playing them, they're writing new ones!" essay. I thought his discussion of the relationship between IF and electronic literature showed some insight.

I also discovered that while text adventure games where born into the family of computer games, they had since "grown up" and began "hanging out" with the literature crowd (though it still regularly writes home) -- which is to say that in much latter-day interactive fiction, particularly things produced since 1996, storytelling had been increasingly emphasized and the puzzles deemphasized. Not that puzzles were gone, but more and more authors of IF were trying to integrate puzzles into a coherent and compelling plot, rather than (as was often the case in earlier years) letting the story serve as an ostensible premise, but populating the thing with puzzles that had nothing to do with the plot. Now, some interactive fiction goes whole hog and abolishes puzzles altogether!

So, why continue to try to tell a story through this medium? Because making the player/reader drive the course of the story allows for some interesting effects; a skillful author can get the player/reader to identify with the protagonist in ways that simply aren't possible in static fiction (because the player/reader has a sense of complicity, to use a favorite word, in the plot that the static fiction reader lacks). Plus there are all sorts of neat things that can be done with narrative when you have a computer on your side.

While there are plenty of puzzle-centric games that also happen to be well-written (Lock and Key comes to mind), it's true that the more literary IF works have attracted more attention from critics and reviewers.