See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
A man with a black trench coat whose shooting rampage in a Montreal college killed one person and wounded 19 others before he was slain by police said on a blog in his name that he liked to play a role-playing Internet game about the Columbine shootings. —Montreal gunman liked ‘Columbine’ game (Yahoo! | AP) Of…
When four planes were hijacked on a sunny fall morning, easy-to-use blogging services were still few and far between. Yet many who witnessed the horror of the attacks firsthand took to the keyboard to talk with the world. Horrified Americans used e-mail, instant messages, any available communication tool. But weblogs meant large audiences, not just…
The outcry suggests the exhibitionism and voyeurism implied by participation in social networking sites has ill-defined but nonetheless real limits, and expectations of privacy have somehow survived the publishing free-for-all. For many people, apparently, pushing information to everyone on a friends list is not at all the same as publishing the same information on one’s…
In addition to creating massive numbers of phony blogs, sploggers sometimes take over abandoned real blogs. More than 10 million of the 12.9 million profiles on Blogger surveyed by splog researcher Vasa in June were inactive, either because the bloggers had stopped blogging or because they never got started. (The huge mass of dead blogs…
Adolescence was a long time ago. Grad school taught me to relate to others more as colleagues than friends. If I need reassurance of my students’ esteem, I need look no further than my course evaluations (Ha!). So my sparse friend count doesn’t normally bother me. But when I first opened my account, it read…
—books.google.com Google’s latest offering is the ability to download full-text versions of out-of-copyright books, and to sample the contents of many other books.
The computer was how I wrote! My attachment was dangerous as it now threatened to derail my progress on numerous projects, not the least of which was a manuscript I hoped to finish editing by the end of August. Losing time seemed impossible. I had to push through and figure out a way to adapt,…
A euphemism like “decision-based simulation” maybe, but rarely a “game.” To many, video and computer games represent an adolescent diversion, a parental annoyance that thwarts homework, chores, and all things productive. So when FAS and others stump for games as an educational or training tool, they begin by stating the problem: “You oversee a very…
I am a very visual and active learner. I draw circles around words or phrases, highlight pertinent passages, make marginal marks and notes, or draw small doodles so I can visualize a concept. I make arrows that connect similiar ideas, draw stars next to passages that I hope I’ll be able to find again, or…
Once upon time, in a galaxy exactly like this one, hard-core gamers spent hours staring at screens of tiny text and laboriously typing commands to move characters to the next level. That era — approximately 1979 to 1985 — marked the golden age of interactive fiction, when games commonly consisted of text adventures tailored to…
A zoo in the Netherlands plans to set up a webcam to help its orangutans form long-distance relationships with potential mates in Indonesia. —Dutch plan orangutang web dating (BBC) Thanks for the link, Rosemary.
Amazon used to be a large river in South America – but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the Observer’s Net specialist…
The house that Gates built will be launching XNA Game Studio Express, a set of (dumbed-down) development tools that will allow hobbyists and their ilk to develop games for both the Xbox 360 and the PC. Initially, these homebrew (is it still considered “homebrew” if you’re using official tools?) games will only be playable to…
Bloggers have been making fun of the examples Google’s lawyers deem acceptable. They included: “Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie.” Web veterans have also been taken aback by Google’s suddenly humourless approach. The eight-year-old company has previously cultivated an image of youthful…
You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot of prejudice and superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words: “The female of man. See HOMO.”) If you look up “coffee preparation” on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on…
Computers & Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue, Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming While video gaming has been a strong cultural force since the advent of the popular coin-operated arcades of the 1970s, it is only within the last few years that video/computer gaming has been an academic focus:…
The following list is made up of a few things I’ve noticed in a lot of the interactive fiction games I’ve tested or tried out. I’ve tried these games for reasons I can’t entirely fathom; admittedly, it’s easier and leaves fewer disfiguring scars than self-flagellation. It is not necessarily any less painful though. —Michael J.…
Until recently entertainment reporting was in the hands of respectful, publicist-friendly titles such as Vanity Fair and The Los Angeles Times. Indeed, the latter recently opened one of its celebrity articles with this gem of a sentence: “One doesn’t so much interview Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as sit back and watch as their friendship,…
The blog hurt the administration in two key ways: First, administrators were unable to focus on correcting the problems that led to the creation of the blog, and second, the administration’s clumsy and futile efforts to combat the blog simply compounded the anger and contempt on campus. —Daniel W. Barwick —The Blog That Ate a…
—Wintergreen ”When I Wake Up” (KeithSchofield.com) Is this for real? I’m not so sure the song goes with the images, but it’s still awesome.