See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Of course, computer games and the machines they run on have changed enormously since Zork first appeared in 1980. But I can’t say that the games are any more entertaining. Playing Zork and some of the other games of the day that were called “interactive fiction” was like reading a “Lord of the Rings” book…
For the few seconds between the announcement that Ratzinger was named pope, and the announcement of his choice of name, the Wikipedia entry was titled Pope Joseph… I just happened to catch it on the fly (it was changed before I could update it)… —Stephen Downes, in a comment. —How the Community Can Work, Fast (Dan…
Google il Papa! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Google hasn’t yet started returning meaningful results for “Benedict XVI” in its main search results, though its news service was doing fine right from the start. At 1:45 EST, I googled the new pope’s name, and found plenty of speculation that the next pope after John Paul II would choose…
—i am 8-bit A Los Angeles art show. Website requires Flash.
Sorry, we were unable to locate document(s) pertaining to your request. Did you mean: zirconium instead of kirschenbaum? —This Morning’s Lesson in Machine Learning (Or, So Said the Search Engine Unto Me) (MGK) This is tremendous news… search technology has advanced to the point where a search engine has become aware of Matt Kirschenbaum’s strong, metallic…
The real appeal of the game is seeing Star Wars characters rendered in itty-bitty plastic form. By the end of the game, there are more than 30 different little guys you can be in Free Play mode. The good guys are cute, but the evil folks are just adorable. Mini-Maul! Sen. Palpateeny! Bite-sized battle droids!…
Goodbye, Blogdex (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I used to love Blogdex, but today’s “most contagious information currently spreading in the weblog community” are measured by a grand total of three links. So I’ve taken it off my blogroll. (I can’t remember the last time I did that.) The last announcement was posted in October of 2004, and…
—Gibby’s Game Room (Nescapades) That’s my first computer on the bottom shelf, a Texas Instruments TI-99 4A (c. 1981). The key combination that produced “+” was “shift+equals.” The key combination that produced “System Reset” was “namelessbutton-right-next-to-shift + equals.” One day it started smoking, so we took it back to the store. I didn’t see an Atari…
Are libraries and librarians willing to support initiative to provide weblog support for their community? The University of Minnesota Libraries think so: “It is our goal to develop a blog server through which everyone in the university community (faculty, staff, and student) can have access to their own individual blog” (University of Minnesota Libraries, accessed…
Although not traditionally the domain of special collections, I have chosen to use the donation to create a new collection in the area of interactive fiction, specializing in the early works published by Infocom. Interactive fiction is a genre of computer game that is more literary than most computer and video games popular today. Also…
Here’s what you can do with a text book: read it. You can also lose it, rip the pages out, deface the cover, and generally abuse it until it has to be replaced. But as far as a delivery vehicle for content goes, you can basically only consume it by reading it. Here’s what you…
“Certainly, I didn’t do as much as I should have after all the excitement of the late 1990s. I suspect many of you in this room did the same, quietly hoping that this thing called the digital revolution would just limp away.” —Rupert Murdoch, “old media” mogul. —News must adapt to web, says Murdoch (Guardian)
I don’t believe that the internet is a leveller of genders. In fact, in many cases, it seems to be the opposite. I spend a lot of time on IRC (internet relay chat), where my IRC nick is not gender-neutral. On many occasions I have joined IRC channels to ask technical questions, and have encountered…
Wireless internet is an idea that first formulated back during the Cold War. It was a young Al Gore who first was struck in the head by an apple (much like Sir Newton, except this apple was thrown at Gore by Ollie North). Mr. Gore said to himself, in a very slow and monotonous tone,…
I spent quite a bit of time sorting through (and adding to) my collection of blogging-related bookmarks. Several of these have been linked here previously, but I thought it would be useful to compile them for easy reference. Here, for example is a (perhaps somewhat arbitrary) collection of blog criticisim links… —William Cole —Blogging Workshop (Donut…
In the spirit of endism, here’s a list of all the forms of major media and how they’re trending. Make of it what you will. Flat to Down to Way Down: Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999 Television: network TV’s audience share has fallen by a third since 1985…
Although a failed business enterprise, Laurel‘sPurple Moon seemed to do exactly what it had planned — hit it off with girls. Her idea that games should consist of relationships, values such as loyalty, love, and courage, and conflicts such as jealousy, cheating, exclusion, racism, materialism, and broken homes seems worthwhile, but as a young girl…
The implications of scalable theory have been far-reaching and pervasive. In fact, few end-users would disagree with the deployment of expert systems, which embodies the private principles of artificial intelligence. We explore new introspective configurations, which we call KindlerDop.–Shatner, Elmo, Jerz and Nye —An Improvement of XML (SciGen) Read the backstory behind this random CS paper…
If something needs to be prettier, they just add a few lines of description (or remove some – “beautiful” could challenge your mind to create an entirely different image than “beautiful blonde”) instead of spending hours rendering. In fact, there’s so much content, Mihaly says it would just be too difficult to convert his game…
Another project, called Second Future, was undertaken by nine adults with cerebral palsy, and seeks to provide a forum in which they can share in the everyday personal interactions that most people take for granted. The group of nine, who share a single Second Life avatar known as Wilde Cunningham, get to experience being around…