See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life. —Alan…
A great introduction to a medium near and dear to my heart. —Writing Interactive Fiction (a.k.a. “Text Adventure Games”) with the Inform Programming Language (IndieGameDev)
“He was keeping a journal of sorts to put together for future history,” John Ellsworth told BBC News. “He wanted to make sure that his generation, as well as following generations, have actual words from somebody who was there.” But Mr Ellsworth Snr was shocked when Yahoo! turned down a request to release his dead…
Most people’s expectations of robots are driven by fantasy. These marvelous machines, optimists hope, will follow Moore’s law, doubling in quality every 18 months, and lead to a Jetsonian utopia. Or, as pessimists fear, humanoid bots will reproduce, increase their intelligence, and wipe out humanity. Both visions are wrong. —By Jordan Pollack —Ethics for the…
“Gamers are everywhere and they’re everyone. They are your friends, neighbors, co-workers, relatives, and kids, they lead responsible and caring lives, balancing their enjoyment of interactive entertainment with many other activities important to a well-rounded lifestyle,” said Douglas Lowenstein, president of the ESA, the trade association representing U.S. computer and video game publishers. “Indeed, those…
Aarseth, bringing up an overgeneralization in another recent article, his piece in First Person, goes on to admit that ?most proper narratologists, who actually have to think about and define narratives in a scholarly, responsible, and accurate way, are not guilty of this overgeneralization.? I have to wonder, then: Why is most of Aarseth‘sNarrative across…
Many high school and college students accustomed to sending unlimited instant messages on their computers do not adapt easily to text messaging’s pay-per-message format, and end up with unexpectedly high bills when they get involved in keypad conversations that involve hundreds, even thousands, of messages a month. The results are angry confrontations with parents, long-term…
Adventure – based on the classic text game of the same name – was the first game ever to contain an easter egg. —Is That A Dragon or a Duck? (Metafilter) It’s great to see Adventure get a mention, but no, the Atari version was a graphics game that really shared nothing besides the name with…
—The Blogosphere By the Numbers Nothing terribly quotable, but a good source of statistics relating to weblogs.
IF as a genre, fundamentally unchanged for more than twenty years, evolved in a world of gaming where graphics were non-existent and words were the sole medium of expression. The game described locations, objects, and actions in text, and the player controlled the story’s protagonist by typing commands in English (or any other natural language…
—Weblogging Software Leader Six Apart Acquires LiveJournal (Biz Yahoo) There’s really nothing quotable in this rather dry press release, but I’m linking to it as a reference anyway. SixApart is the company that makes MoveableType, the software I use for blogs.setonhill.edu. An increasing number of my students are familiar with the LiveJournal style of personal blogging…
The X-Monkey comes from a line of monkeys originally bred by the military for the purpose of driving tanks. It’s a good fit, because the modern Apple sedan is actually a tank in a fancy shell. The X-Monkey’s only drawback is that he can only drive a car from Apple. Show him any other vehicle,…
While the number of new blogs is rising, readership is growing even faster. —Dan Gillmor —A Medium Coming Into Its Own (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism) Gillmor is commenting on a datum from a new study from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Ultimately, it became very clear that the most active and influential members of the project–beginning with Jimmy Wales, who hired me to start a free encyclopedia project and who now manages Wikipedia and Wikimedia–were decidedly anti-elitist in the above-described sense. Consequently, nearly everyone with much expertise but little patience will avoid editing Wikipedia, because they…
Leading British computer games maker Peter Molyneux has been made an OBE in the New Year Honours list. The head of Surrey’s Lionhead Studios was granted the honour for services to the computer games industry. —Call of honour for UK games maker (BBC) OBE = “Order Of the British Empire”. The article’s last paragraph: “Being an…
Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the journalists who roam from one disaster to another, said Xeni Jardin, one of the four co-editors of the site BoingBoing.net, which pointed visitors to many of the disaster blogs. “They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that…
For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that’s played God with the American public, telling everyone what’s news and what’s not, what to play up and what to downplay. But 2004 was the year the power started shifting, that the Little People, if you will, started to tell the gods of…
In the bowels of the British Library, the first object the conservator showed Seales was a manuscript that was so mangled, he says, “We almost ran screaming from the room, because there was nothing we could do. We had no tools that could help.” Seales tells me such manuscript fragments exist in the nooks and…
Washington Post Co. on Tuesday said it would buy Microsoft Corp.’s online magazine Slate, whose mix of politics, news and culture has built a loyal following but failed to yield significant profits. —Martha Graybow —Washington Post to Buy Web Magazine Slate (Reuters)
“Sometimes you do everything right and you still die,” Mr. Wade said. “So you pick yourself up and start again.” I can live with that message, even though I can’t shake the feeling that it was designed to sell books to conflicted parents like me. —Learning Early That Success Is a Game (NY Times) An interesting…