See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Writing Teachers Writing New Media (Jerz’s CCCC 05 Notes) “What did you guys do to earn walls?” -overheard during the (long) setup for this presentation. Hoping to find an opportunity to continue the discussion of the intellectual property issues Lawrence Lessig raised on Thursday, I attended “Writing Teachers Writing New Media,” where three young presenters from…
Finally getting around to blogging some notes about sessions I’ve attended. I don’t know if the overall quality of the conference has improved or if I just really know how to pick ’em, but all the sessions I’ve attended so far have been great. The first session I attended was “Evaluating Academic Weblogs: Using Empirical…
In 1992, IF enthusiast Volker Blasius started the IF Archive, which brought together remaining text adventure files and fans from across the Internet. Paul O’Brian, who runs a newsletter for IF fans, says the archive brought text gamers together. “The fact that people can go to one predictable, reliable space … has given the community…
—Personalized Google News (Google) A great little addition to Google’s incredibly useful news aggregator. I deleted the “sports” section, and added sections containing keywords that I always find myself googling. The search I created for “weblog” isn’t very useful, but I’ll play with the interface later. There doesn’t seem to be a way for me to…
The demand is such that the niche has grown from text-based games coded by hobbyists to between 30 and 50 professional audio-game developers who sell 3,000 games a year, experts estimate. Most of these games run on ordinary PCs and are often joystick- or keyboard-controlled. The player dons a pair of headphones, and elements of…
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta is out and it’s revolutionary: New technology, better interoperability, and even easier to use. But it is still in beta. Tell us what is good and what needs fixing. —Open Office 2.0 Beta I haven’t checked this out, but I’ve been looking for an alternative to MS-Word’s horrible HTML output — something…
The emergence of cyberbullying has intensified adolescent angst. It allows bullies to unleash put-downs, nasty rumors and humiliating pictures in e-mail and blogs that can strike victims at home and at any time. The damage can be devastating, psychologists say, even as it is not always obvious to parents and teachers. —Jon Swartz —Schoolyard bullies…
Last week‘sblog on the state of videogame writing, and the possible solution offered by New Games Journalism, attracted plenty of debate, but many of you wanted to see a few more examples of the NGJ style. —Keith Stuart —Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism (Gamesblog) I’ve been kicking around an idea for a games-related writing…
They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it’s the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it’s the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be…
To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral – librarians, lexicographers, academics – that’s precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock’s place…
There’s certainly nothing new about student blogs – there are millions of them floating in cyberspace. What separates these online journals from the rest of the pack is that they are university sponsored and featured prominently on a school’s admissions pages. These journals are photo heavy and focus on a few events every few weeks.…
—Drive-by Blogging (Google) Weblog portfolios are due soon, so there’s more activity than usual on my students’ weblogs. Moira mentioned that fellow student Evan Reynolds had used the term “drive-by blogging” to describe the sudden rush of blog entries that fill in the gaps and fulfill the requrements of the weblog portfolio assignment. That was a…
For the uninitiated, FUD stands for ?Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.? It is a term popular within the free software community, used to describe the use of lies and deceptive rhetoric, aimed chiefly at free software projects. It is an accurate term. In brief, the goal of FUD is to make money when the free software…
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of “web log.”) Until recently, I…
—Dennis G. Jerz (IF Wiki) My entry on the IF Wiki. Thanks, Dswxyz, for compiling it. Has it been that long since I entered the IF Comp? I miss Troy Sterling and Melody Sweet (characters from my game, “Fine-Tuned: An Auto-mated Romance“). Incidentally, I just found this SynTax walkthrough for Fine-Tuned, which was reviewed and included…
I‘m very much in agreement with the reservations Joe Harris has expressed about the personal essay — the worry that grading, in some ways, becomes an evaluation of the self that the student represents on the page — but after reading the MetaFilter thread, one of my responses to the Personal Essay assignment has become…
And so the darkness touches the links, and the darkness tastes their power, and the darkness broods and breeds in its desire. The dragon of the night rises, corporations tangled in its wings. It leaves the links powerless, the search-engines crippled, and the readers lost as the rankings swell like rivers and the paths of…
Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek‘srevelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements (or not); and the news that…
It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward…
The New York Times Co. has agreed to buy About.com from Primedia Inc. in an all-cash deal valued at about $410 million. —NY Times agrees to buy About.com (New York Business) About.com is a collection of free resources compiled by “experts” in a format that resembles a blog. The About.com authors are part-timers, enthusiasts who post…