See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Interactive media are highly complex and at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games,…
Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple’s iPod. This serves companies’ business interests, but not the wider interests of consumers. […] At this point, “friend” relationships…
Rather, Salen and other planners are looking at how games naturally engage players and teach them new skills, and hope to apply those principles to create kids who not only ace their SATs, but are also well suited for the 21st century. Games offer a context for problem-solving with immediate feedback, and often involve social…
A pity effort to hack into the hacker-only conference DEFCON was attempted by the NBC reporter Michelle Madigan. Apparently the Associate Producer for Dateline NBC entered the DEFCON with a hidden camera and tried to film attendees confessing to illegal activities. According to some sources, Madigan was working on an investigative piece called “Hackers for…
A frequent objection I hear from Digital Immigrant educators is “this approach is great for facts, but it wouldn’t work for ‘my subject.’” Nonsense. This is just rationalization and lack of imagination. In my talks I now include “thought experiments” where I invite professors and teachers to suggest a subject or topic, and I attempt…
Gamers are unequivocal: “Dying gives a game meaning”, say posters on the PC Advisor forums. Markus Montola, a researcher at Tampere University in Finland, takes this further: “You have a motivation – to avoid being annoyed by dying. Motivation is what makes the game meaningful.” Pete Hines – vice-president at Bethesda, the developer behind the…
Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual…
Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned. Linden’s in-world traffic tally, which factors in both the number of visitors and time spent, shows that the big draws…
“I have never forgotten the magic night that my own father, like his father and his father’s father before him, gently woke me, bundled me up in a warm blanket and quietly led me outside to see the Northern Lights for the first time,” said the elder Meier, dejectedly sipping a cup of hot cocoa…
An armed gang of four kidnapped one of the world’s top RPG gamers after one criminal’s girlfriend lured him into a fake date using Orkut, Google’s social network. After sequestering him in Sao Paulo, they held a gun against the victim’s head for five hours to get his password, which they wanted to sell for…
—Echochrome – the Escher Game (YouTube, Via Game Girl Advance) What a hypnotically simple interface! This is a PSP game. Since I’m not a platform gamer, I’ll have to admire this one from afar.
Asking contributors to “write the story on open-source car design” had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response. —Jeff Howe —Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (Wired) An assessment of…
Your job is very simple! All you need to do is look out for the features that mark out sprial and elliptical galaxies. In fact, as you’re a human and not a computer, most galaxies should be easy to classify since they’re obviously spirals or obviously ellipticals. On this page, you will practice classifying galaxies.…
“You know, they’re not that bad, but they were meant to be private. And it is making me feel very vulnerable that the entire country has to see them now because of this situation.” —Miss N.J. releases blackmail photos (MSNBC) Amy Polumbo, the 22-year-old Miss New Jersey, says she had put the photos on a password-protected…
—What People are Doing [US Social Networking Sites] (Businessweek) An interesting, but not very well-sourced graphic, that shows 70% of youth (ages 18-21) are members of social networks, but only 37% create content on those sites. (I’m not sure what the researchers count as “creating content” — there’s a separate column for “Critics” who comment on…
—Lego White and Nerdy (YouTube) Weird Al’s awesome “White and Nerdy” has spawned not just one but several different Lego versions (of various quality levels).
Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years. * User-Created Content. It’s all about the audience, and the “audience” is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small…
Sites like the Blake archive mark an important point of departure from expensive clothbound volumes available in university libraries — and unique items in private collections — to high-resolution facsimiles freely available to anyone with Internet access. Even the nonspecialist (like me) can easily spend hours appreciating Blake’s aesthetic achievement beyond reading the unadorned transcriptions…
If I’m working on a project, it’s my dream. I’m not toiling away in a dank quarry, hauling blocks across miles of boiling sand to build someone else’s pyramid. If you’re going to grind your life away in a masochistic profession – and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism – I say to…
RUR Cats (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My first (and probably only) contribution to the LOLCats meme. In the 1920s, the Czech play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) introduced the world to a word that quickly displaced older terms such as “automaton.” As author Karel Capek was working out the plot, he fretted that calling them “labori” would be…