See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
In what might be a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, a Pennsylvania lawyer is suing the publisher of the rapidly growing online world Second Life, alleging the company unfairly confiscated tens of thousands of dollars worth of his virtual land and other property. —Kathleen Craig —Second Life Land Deal Goes Sour (Wired)
Casual Game: The Game uses a special wireless-control wand covered with buttons. Using this control, your job is to scan through a large number of audio-visual “entertainment streams” to find the one you enjoy the most. Once you’ve picked one, you can control the volume of the audio, the brightness of the screen and, for…
—Key & Compass – IF Games Index This is an incredibly efficient, beautifully constructed index to interactive fiction games, with icons indicating platform, awards, and additional information. I wish I could click on the award icon and be taken to a list of other games that shared the same award. Actually, clicking on any icon…
First and foremost, e-mail lacks cues like facial expression and tone of voice. That makes it difficult for recipients to decode meaning well. Second, the prospect of instantaneous communication creates an urgency that pressures e-mailers to think and write quickly, which can lead to carelessness. Finally, the inability to develop personal rapport over e-mail makes…
“If you walk into a roomful of middle school girls and say ‘Do you want to learn how to program a computer?’, only a few hands will go up,” says Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Randy Pausch. “But if you walk in and say ‘Do you want to learn how to tell a story…
—MySpace: The Movie (YouTube) I just watched MySpace: The Movie. (Above link goes to the version on YouTube, which is more accessible, but the filmmaker’s site is davidlehre.com.) The cross-dressing gag is just juvenile, and the editing in that skit needed to be tighter. Overall, though, this little collection of skits is a good window into…
The city’s 23-year-old mayor took down his profile on MySpace.com after his occupation ended up reading: “malebigalow.” Ryan Bingham said he didn’t post that information — an apparent reference to the 1999 movie “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” — and he doesn’t know who did. —Mayor pulls MySpace.com page after job shows up as ‘malebigalow’ (Boston.com |…
In a sense, the world of online collaboration is discovering what artists have always known: Rigid conventions are often crucial to producing art. Novels, poems, and oil paintings are really just structural devices that take an artist’s zillion competing ideas?an internal, self-contradicting mob?and focus them into a coherent work. Mind you, online collaborators are finding…
In any field, it’s important to keep track of the underdogs — the new developments and theories, the older hypotheses once thought exhausted of information. Doesn’t matter if you’re in writing, physics, psychology, or athletics, keeping a broad horizon pays off. That’s what I’m doing here — showing you the underdogs of gaming. You might…
This allows us to see the underlying problem of digital game studies: ‘narratologists’ and ‘ludologists’ alike would rather be fragged to bits than make a negative value judgement. The reason for this is to be found in the history of game studies: once upon a time, videogames were only taken seriously by psychologists. They would…
— Reinhold Grether —Virtual Performance Bibliography (netzwissenschaft) Designed for courses “Theater and the Internet” & “The Digital Arena.”
—Windows Noises by Colin Staples (Albino Blacksheep) Cool Flash movie.
My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to…
I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that’s a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I’ve been working on…
Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The…
Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages – you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well,…
I think that ultimatley a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression. But, you do end up killing literally hundres of representations of high- schoolers. But ‘m not sure the ulitimate intention was to trivialize it. It seemed like the purpose was to expose people to what happened in a unique perspective. There are…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I’d rather have the thousand words. — Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fiction (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Only the truly geeky will appreciate just what it means to find yourself in someone else’s Usenet tagline. I happened upon a reference to my name…
Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it’s curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I’ve ever created. I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.…
Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 10 — Why Hammer Isn’t Good for Fiddly Details or, The Mystery Room Revealed (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) These last few weeks were a bit crazy, so I fell a bit behind in my Half Life 2 modding. Instead, I spent some time working on two different conference proposals that deal with interactive…