See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don’t apply to such sites, because the readers’ prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren’t your mother, however, usability becomes…
Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won’t be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it’s time for Google to get on top of this. They’re both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive…
“It’s important to emphasize story and emotion and character. This is one of the things that games don’t do,” Spielberg said. “Currently, what games do is they give you the entire story in the run-up to the actual game play from level to level. You get to see a movie, and you’re supposed to remember…
—Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman) A great collection of teaching links, highlighting what teachers who happen to blog are saying about their work.
The industry and the market are bewitched by the idea of more pixels and polys. Higher visual quality is fair enough, but why is it equated with better stabs at photo-realism? What’s the point of aesthetics at all? If they don’t matter, how come E3 can sucker-smack a “wow” or two out of so many…
The Internet is now teeming with some 15 million blogs. Although the medium first drew mainstream attention with commentary on high-profile events such as the presidential election, many now use it to chronicle intensely personal experiences, venting confessions in front of millions of strangers who can write back. Nearly half of bloggers consider it a…
Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter. —Fuzzmail (fuzzmail.org)…
I am also not claiming that IF should self-evidently be assimilated under the umbrella of “games,” but instead is being cruelly excluded. There is plenty of ambivalence about whether or not IF belongs in games on all sides, both from within the IF community and from without. As “fiction” that is experience by playing a…
Google is dumb: it places so much trust on its relevance ranking in its presentation of search results as a simple list of Web sites. Users don’t have access to suggestions of alternate concepts or terms or all the tools that other search engines provide. Our clients are placing too much reliance on the first…
Blogs are all the rage, and I encourage their use as part of the external – and internal – communications process. Unlike press releases, which tend to read as if they’d been composed by the mating of a computer and lawyer, good blogs have a distinctly human voice. They are conversational almost by definition. But…
Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire’s December issue. The original version…
The ?word daemon?, Leonard ventures, ?however spelled, uncovers a provocative and useful dualism. An intermediary with another world doesn’t have to be beneficient. Yet neither is it compelled to be nefarious. It can be both, flip-flopping between positive and negative states?depending on context or perception, on the vagaries of polities, or the whims of the…
While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn’t be an academic’s main focus if he or she wants to get tenure. But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or…
We expect them to be able to follow us around the house, picking up after us, chattering with us like C-3PO, reading our emotions with the accuracy, if not the intent, of HAL. While robots have proved indispensable in narrow kinds of work, like assembly lines, when it comes to interactions with unpredictable, flesh-and-blood humans,…
The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society. From iPods filling commuters’ ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like…
There’s no question that certain things are lost when documents are prepared and transmitted in electronic formats. The texture, heft, even smell of the paper, the coffee cup’s stain, the crinkled edges and dog-eared pages, the physical abrasions of marks and erasures. Let’s think for a moment about what’s gained though. By opening my word…
There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us – so seemingly obvious – that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here’s a case in point – the weblog post’s permalink. I mean – let’s think about it. The problem was that a weblog’s front page is by far…
Welcome to IFComp 2005, the competition for short text adventures. —Interactive Fiction Competition 2005 (ifcomp.org) Free text-adventure games, written specifically for this annual competition. Anyone can be a judge.
PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains! —Manifesto Games Grek Gostikyan, science fiction author and game developer, resigned from Nokia in order to invest his energies in the indie game development movement. He blogs at Games * Art * Design * Culture.
WASHINGTON, DC—Congress scrapped the open-source, open-edit, online version of the Constitution Monday, only two months after it went live. “The idea seemed to dovetail perfectly with our tradition of democratic participation,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said. “But when so-called ‘contributors’ began loading it down with profanity, pornography, ASCII art, and mandatory-assault-rifle-ownership amendments, we thought…