See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
The researchers found that the games can provide opportunities for achievement, freedom and even a connection to other players. Those benefits trumped a shallow sense of fun, which doesn’t keep gamers as interested. Players reported feeling the best when the games produced positive experiences and challenges that connected to what they knew in the real…
Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson’s best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions. When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book…
What’s it actually like? Does it exploit the tragedy for cheap thrills? Or does it actually have artistic merit — offering a new way to think about Columbine? Right off the bat, Ledonne tries to put his critics off guard by delivering precisely the opposite of what you’d expect. Nobody will be able to use…
Even Twain scholars seem to have missed his foresight on this subject. I discovered it by accident, in browsing through the 24 volumes of his collected works in the “Author’s National Edition.” In an 1898 short story called “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” he describes an invention called the “telelectroscope,” a gadget hooked up…
Recently, I tried to help a faculty member at my college submit a grant proposal to a National Institutes of Health competition. I soon discovered that one can no longer submit a grant to NIH directly. One has to submit it through Grants.gov. I estimate that it took me more than 25 hours to try…
The primary focus of this conference is to explore the growing cultural importance of interactive media. All scholarship on digital interactive media, such as computer games, mixed realities and interactive fiction, as well as users, including adults and children, will be considered in one of four broad conference streams: —Interacting with Immersive Worlds (Brock University) The…
I have seen it, touched it, and played with it. The final industrial design prototype for the XO, the device that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Initiative is going to start shipping to countries across the world this summer. AMD hosted a luncheon on Monday to give the press an update on the project,…
Whatever one thinks of the game’s content, the game went through an extensive judging process and was deemed a finalist by a jury of game experts. To have the game pulled based on either pressure from backers or a fear of liability is to say that independent games do not deserve the same respect and…
You know something is seriously changing in a genre when a masked serial killer invites you to check out his “blog”. Such a gesture is obviously a solicitation of interactive engagement — a marketing scheme intended to solicit an investment of attention and to mollify a fan base, with the promise of giving a web-savvy…
The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don’t care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They’re increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the…
In an optical or physical sense, the capabilities of modern day computers have really put “reality” immersion within reach. Yet, this aspect of immersion–the “wow it looks so real” factor–has become a crutch and the only pillar of the immersion experience for which most games aim. Maybe it’s easier to sell or produce en masse.…
The vast majority of teens who use social networking sites say they use the sites to maintain their current friendships, while half report using the sites to make new friends. Teens say they use social networking sites to stay in touch with friends they see a lot (91% of social networking teens report this), but…
Humans communicate with each other through voice inflection, timing, and gesture. “Those capabilities are hard-wired into humans,” Pausch explains. “You wouldn’t put up with a person who makes you learn how to type commands to him; why should you have to talk to computers that way? Ultimately, we’d like to be able to read facial…
I designed these simple 3D cabinets in Blender3D, with the idea that I would use this model, which is mostly right angles and cubes with a woodgrain texture and a marble texture, as a simple test when I try bringing custom models into Hammer. Classes start in about three weeks, and I’ll start going back…
In reporting a story for the Web, the interview process does not end with publication. When writing a piece, always include an invitation for knowledgeable readers to add more to the story. Writers who fail to do this invite suspicion that they are more interested in promoting (and protecting) their own point of view, instead…
For instance, on the day that I am writing this (Christmas Day, 2006), the big news story is that James Brown, one of the greats of rock ‘n roll music, has died. As an individual running a news web site — or as a student running a news web site — I probably would not…
Hammer, 3D Design, and the Virtues of Minimalism (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For the past month, as preparation for teaching a brief Hammer unit in my “New Media Projects” course, I got pretty good at Hammer basics — in part because I recorded a series of Flash tutorials, and doing so really solidified some basic design skills.…
Your mission is one of the most important mission that has taken place every year for hundreds of years. This mission requires you to do the impossible: DELIVER PRESENTS TO ALL THE BOYS AND GIRLS ALL OVER THE WORLD. You must position your distribution system before Christmas Eve. It’s Christmas, and everybody wins. But maybe…
Does it matter that most films offer such an unrealistic depiction of usability? Mainly, no. A movie’s purpose is entertainment, not task performance. So, go ahead and employ user interfaces and interaction techniques that are entertaining and would never work in the real world. Films are littered with so many other unrealistic plot details: you’d…
Guiding a single point of light seems most suitable in a highly abstract game, and the pixel has shined in several of these. The driving real-time puzzle game Qix, a coin-op game from the 1980s, is a notable one. (Admittedly, the player’s pixel is highlighted with a surrounding diamond, but it’s still reasonably considered a…