See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
One complaint that hardcore IF fans have about such derivations from the old school plain text game is that developers often get so caught up in designing the graphics and recording the sound effects that the story line, the most important part of a true interactive fiction game, gets lost in the shuffle. The difference…
Because your Sims are much more self-sufficient than in the original — they can generally manage to eat and go to the bathroom when they need to — you’re freed up to help them out with their aspirations, which puts you more in the role of a benevolent guardian angel than an invisible day-care teacher.…
You’d have thought I’d thrown rats down on the tables. One student got really angry, said he never knew what to expect in this class and now he’d always be on guard from now on. Another said he felt that I’d broken his confidence–“It’s one thing to see it back and forth on e-mail, but…
Blogrolling‘sgone dark and the blogrolls lie limp, no shuffle and bustle as busy blogs hustle their way to the head of the queue. Gone too are the diacriticals, small, precious marks of individualization, the QWERTY electron bursts that celebrate fresh activity, new life?our SETI receivers. Brackets and parentheses, asterisks and exclamations, plusses and minuses and…
I could have sketched the layout of her blog for her with fair accuracy, but I?ve never before spoken her name. —Jill Walker —ubiquity? (jill/txt) An interesting epiphany describing the impersonal intimacy one can experience in the blogosphere.
Much of what I and a former student put in “Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips” also applies to e-newsletters, but people are much more likely to scan (or trash) newsletters that seem irrelevant. I like e-mail newsletters because they are self-contained — I can print them out and read them offline, or I can…
FactCheck.org fills a journalistic void. Major media outlets tend to report on the strategy behind campaign commercials rather than analyzing the content for veracity. Even though Jackson pioneered ad watches for CNN, the cable network let him go last year. “I’ve seen the press generally put less emphasis on ad watches and fact-check-type stories,” Jackson…
After much delay, the results of this year’s BetaComp are in. I was pleased to see that once again, each entrant found at least *something* that no other entrant did, and no single entrant found more than about 50% of all the bugs that were found. This reinforces the prevailing theory that several testers (and…
The problem with comments, open forums, e-mail discussion lists and other user-generated online content is that it takes work — usually a moderator or trust system — to make sure the comments stay relevant, clean and spam-free. In fact, spammers have made old Usenet groups unreadable, have flooded most e-mail inboxes, and have brought their…
You are now registered for Serious Games Summit at the Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, DC on October 18-19, 2004. Serious Games Summit Registration Confirmation (Serious Games Summit) The Seton Hill administration came up with most of the cost of registering for the conference, which was very generous, since I’m not presenting a paper. My…
I have never posted before, and I hope that I am doing this correctly. This is in response to the questions about the dates of the birth of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. —Dennis G. Jerz, 1993. —Clueless Usenet Newbie: ”Re: Jesus’ Birthday” (alt.folklore.urban) What a dork I was. I was… am part of the Eternal…
[O]nline media can take us and our readers to places journalism hasn’t been before. And in those places, our values may be obstacles or antiques. Please consider: Balance/Fairness/WholenessHypertext links to more information can guarantee thorough reporting. But we should decide: When we should link to ads, to editorials or columns, to sites of partisan organizations,…
While some early reviews bemoan the fact that elements of Fable had to be scaled back, it‘sclear that the game is still remarkably ambitious. As the player‘scharacter ages, and as the world changes around him (“him? because plans for female heros were among those cut), he can choose at almost any time to explore and…
While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was “cut and pasted” from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive. There was almost no exchange or…
On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a…
Student Impressions of Internet History Milestones (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) This morning I gave my students a randomized list of key events in the history of the internet, and asked them to estimate the year when each event happened. “Average” gives the average of all student guesses. “Actual” gives the actual date. “Diff” gives the difference. …
Historical Awareness of the Internet (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Most college students today would probably say that they feel very comfortable using the internet. Some really and truly are expert users, with a deep understanding of the function and history of the internet. But I find that when they first arrive at college, most students bring with…
We don’t have cable TV at home, so I don’t watch much TV. My mother-in-law occasionally tapes educational shows from PBS, and sends them up to us. In 2000, when my son was 2, she filled a whole tape with “Between the Lions” (about a family of lions that lives in a library… get it?…
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars).…
After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record. This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that’s needed to force Google to produce a copy. Other countries may even lack this basic protection,…