See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
# If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already). # This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this: # 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a…
Art or not, games are much more than the just sums of their parts. Any idiot can write a review that simply describes a game‘sfunctionality and tells you that it is technically superior to similar games that have come before it. A good writer can take the same game and evoke for the reader the…
Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called ?ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,? in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA…
Welcome to the Rhetoric and Composition Wiki Book. This wikitext is designed for use as a textbook in first-year college composition programs. We are writing this free wikitext because we believe that while commercial textbook publishers offer excellent products, many of our students are unable to afford them. We would also like to make our…
Since this will be my last drama wildcard, I wanted to say goodbye & good luck to everyone in our class. It has been a fantastic semester and I had a great time. I came into this class thinking I had nothing more to learn (damn senioritis), but I was wrong. I not only developed…
Blogs are the latest form of electronic information that law enforcement is examining as part of investigations, and experts predict they’ll become even more relevant as their popularity grows. “We have to look at that as a new medium to solve crimes,” said Cmdr. Christopher Vicino of the Pasadena, Calif., police department. “We would be…
All of the professors interviewed agreed that the Civ3 gods created a universe in which war goes a long way. The gods, of course, are the game designers who determine the algorithms by which history, in the game, will progress. So in order for the game to accurately portray the inputs that spit out world…
Don’t write the sentence “There has been very little research done on games” in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don’t care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies…
So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels written in English since 1932, in spite of Survey Monkey’s rubric saying free polls were limited to 100 responses. The top 20 is therefore as follows, with the numbers in brackets showing the number of votes. 1. The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy —…
Turning to a few student samples we can see this concept exemplified even more. Below is a quote from one of Dennis Jerz’s students. This is one of the student’s first postings, and you can see his/her enthusiasm about designing and creating a blog. September 08, 2004: LOOK AT ME, I HAVE A BLOG! I…
Each of the following uses a weblog or content management system to manage the site and/or really breaks traditional conventions in other ways, changing the way that the teacher establishes their professional ethos in comparison to the more traditional forms seen above. —Example Instructor Professional Home Pages (Introductory Composition at Purdue: Technical Mentoring) Just doing a…
Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question. […] So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article…
Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe. About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable…
All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but…
But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university’s ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called “The Conversation of Mankind”?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. —Robert S.…
—2005 IF Comp Results Vespers, Beyond, and A New Life are the winners of IF Comp 2005. Woo hoo! Free text games!
I’m back! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid…
As Riya learns who’s in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. —Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix (Wired)
Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don’t rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?) Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for…
Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’. Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a…