See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Many people come here, just as many people seek out the stage, because they know it is a place where they won’t have to grow up too quickly, where the fickleness and irresponsibility of youth are a way of life. Pasts and past relationships are shed like so much old luggage. The unspoken, winking conviction…
And for roughly thirty years, almost any description of mailing lists of any length has mentioned flaming, the tendency of list members to forgo standards of public decorum when attempting to communicate with some ignorant moron whose to stupid to know how too spell and deserves to DIE, die a PAINFUL DEATH, you PINKO SCUMBAG!!!…
Part of the appeal may be that, unlike many of its antecedents, I Love Bees could not be played just by sitting in front of a screen. Over the Internet, players were able to work together on puzzles, usually hidden in corrupted image files on ilovebees.com. Those answers were just starting points, however. Players then…
Reflections on an Emerging Academic Weblog Community (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The Seton Hill blogging community has a small number of dedicated bloggers who generate the vast majority of the activity (at one point I estimated that 5% of our bloggers generate 50% of the activity, though that number changes based on how close we are to…
At the core of the blogosphere lies a minority of active and engaged bloggers who post, comment, and link frequently, creating a kernel of conversational community based on personal networks facilitated by blogging tools and associated technologies. However, for the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their real-world…
News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry, but also blamed bloggers for spreading news that gave a misleading view of the presidential race. —Blogs Blamed for Exit Poll Fiasco (Wired | AP) The headline is a bit incendiary, but the article makes…
Tim Russert’s Electronic Whiteboard (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) “Florida, Florida, Florida,” wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election. Russert has levelled up to a fancy schmancy digital whiteboard. He filled up the columns with data in red and blue, which was a nice touch, but the displays seemed more static than I…
“Our mission is to look at how such a robot should be programmed to respect personal spaces of humans.” The research also focuses on human perception of robots, including how they should look, and how a robot can learn new skills by imitating a human demonstrator. “Without such studies, you will build robots which might…
Ubisoft’s presidential election game, “The Political Machine,” is enjoyable, particularly if you’re caught up in the political hoopla and just can’t get enough of it. The designers have produced an entertaining game that involves making the electoral college system work for you. By default, the game starts you off as John Kerry playing against George…
Traditional gender binaries such as male/female, science/nature, mind/body, are replayed and reinforced again and again in sci-fi films, in which (male) scientific creativity is continually represented as a dangerous affront to “natural” human (female) values. Supercomputers in film are created by male scientists–I can think of no exceptions–and what makes them valuable (according to their…
“Like all games, computer and video games entertain while promoting social development, and playing and talking about games is an important part of young people’s lives,” said project manager Caroline Pelletier. “Games literacy is a way of investigating how games are means of expression and representation, just like writing or drawing,” she said. —Games ‘deserve…
A typical male search query uses just two words, compared with three for women. Women are also more patient about investigating different potential routes. While women are happy to look through six or seven results returned by a search query, men typically only refer to two or three before becoming impatient and refining their search…
The flourishing community of Web-based blogmeisters – some of them skilled journalists, many of them fervent partisans – is transforming the climate in which ideas are floated and tested…. One recurring theme in Internet comment targets the unwillingness of journalists in mainstream media (known as MSM, generally a pejorative) to admit to having opinions of…
Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view. (the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the “back” button…) —Neal Stephenson —Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor (Slashdot) Link found via MGK.
Evil, Evil, Evil (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For the past few days, this blog has been getting comment-spammed one or two times per hour, and my network of student blogs is getting hit with spams that contain URLs with increasingly crude language. I’ve spent over an hour today, and between the two different sites (and two different…
There’s a hot concept called “stealth education” that says it’s possible for people to play a game because they enjoy it and “accidentally” learn stuff along the way. Unfortunately, the concept has yet to prove its worth with the pre-teen and teen community. But what if educational games rivaled the quality and game-play of today’s…
Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist’s executive producer said Tuesday. —Mike Corder —Militants who kidnapped Australian reporter in Baghdad “Googled” him before deciding to release him unharmed (SF Gate)
Jim Dunnigan’s Serious Games Keynote (Serious Games) Jim Dunnigan is a talented speaker who rushed through a entertaining narrative of his own long involvement in serious games. I’ll blog more extensive notes later, but two things that struck me were his reference to geeks as people who can make fortunes for other people, and his mention…
—Serious Games Summit (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Apparently The Washington Post has an article on the Serious Games summit, but I haven’t read it. The conference is scheduled to start in a half hour. I’m glad I got here early. The printed program is alphabetized by title — that’s the stupidest organization technique I’ve seen. The events…
One of the recurring problems that users face is that computers…well…don’t always work quite as well as expected (and sometimes not at all.) But that doesn’t make it any easier for developers and vendors to fix computer problems. For developers to fix the problems, they need to understand what the problem is. Here’s where the…