See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“Serious games” demonstrating everything from flying a jet plane to negotiating a hostage crisis are used to train workers who can’t afford to slip up on the job. Firefighters can use “HazMat:Hotzone” (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/hazmat) to learn how to respond to a chemical-weapons attack, George Soros wannabes can learn the ins and outs of currency trading with…
The prototype consists of two related arenas of activity. In the first, children have to survive ?as lions? outside in a playing field, interacting with a virtual savannah and exploring the opportunities and risks to lions in that space. Children are given GPS-linked PDAs through which they ?see?, ?hear? and ?smell? the world of the…
What is quality in hypertext? How, in other words, do we judge a hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in particular is good about…
Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses. Don’t think for a minute that young people…
—textual genre [spammed to hell] To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke… “
The objective is to fire three shots at Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas from assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s sixth-floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository, all of which has been digitally re-created. Points are awarded depending on how accurately the shots match the official version of events as documented in by the Warren Commission, which…
Purpose: To introduce the fundamental concepts and methods of object-oriented programming, source code compiling, and creating executable files; to promote the art and science of interactive fiction; and to have fun in a creative and novel way. —Byron Philhour and Albert Boyle —Introduction to Object Oriented Programming through Interactive Fiction (St. Ignatius College Preparatory)
Calling a weblog ?literary? does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature. It is not an attempt at categorizing one weblog and its author as more worthwhile in a canonical sense than any other. To the contrary, I propose that every weblog can be considered literary in…
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which…
One of the really good web resources for internet researchers is the wayback machine maintained by the Internet Archive. I have to admit I am not good at using it, but I really should. This was pointed out by David Brake, PhD researcher in London: You suggest in Personal Publication and Public Attention that “the…
—Computers and Writing (George Mason University) The online syllabus for what appears to be a graduate level course — that’s a hefty weekly reading list, that covers a broad range of topics. The next time I can’t think of a blogging topic (which is admittedly rare), I’m coming back here. Compiled by Byron Hawk.
—Writing (in) Cyberspace Hyperpacket (Arizona State University) A good collection of resources, compiled by Katherine Heenan.
The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as “journaling.” For decades, (following, we are probably meant to assume, some breakthrough research at a school of education somewhere) young students have been not merely encouraged but required to fill pages of their…
But can IF ever be great art, the type which people go back over and over to read or play? A similar question would be: can computer games ever be as evocative or lasting as cinema? While these forms have undeniably not produced anything as transcendent as a Bergman film or a Nabokov novel so…
—IF Comp 2004 Results (IFComp.org) Luminous Horizons, by Paul O’Brian, is the winner.
This glossary is an ongoing volunter project that aims to define terms that have developed special meaning among those who write, play, and study interactive fiction (which in this case means a specific kind of parser-based computer game, not literary hypertext). The wiki philosophy is that any page in a wiki text is part of…
So, is the academic attention to blogs the same as “selling out,” the way punk-rockers sold out when they received public acclamation rather than evoke the sensation of disgust? The attention given to weblogs in the media, elevating blogs to journalism or at least commentary, is one way of colonizing the field. If blogging can…
Firefox 1.0 has excellent bookmark-management features, some of which were present in earlier versions of the browser. Users can, with one click, sort bookmarks according to site name, location, date last visited, etc. The newest bookmark feature is Live Bookmarks, which allows users to browse RSS feeds from their favorite websites directly from the site’s…
Some students who were willing to give interactive fiction a chance felt frustrated by the postmodern structure of Photopia. Others who reported being extremely frustrated by IF nevertheless put in significant effort trying to solve the game. For the next exercise, students were asked to choose four games, play each for just fifteen minutes, choose…
Colleges have spent millions on “smart classrooms” packed with the latest gadgets to assist teaching — computerized projection systems, Internet ports at every seat, even video cameras with motion detectors that can track the movements of a lecturer. But colleges have spent far less time and money giving professors the skills to use even the…