See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Putting aside the issue of whether popular culture is distasteful, no one wants to preside at the opening of the Department of Beanie Baby Studies. —Nick Montfort, interviewed by “Mat”. —Interview with Nick Montfort (E Boredom)
Chunking | Forms | Frames | Fitts Law | Flash Usability | Guidelines & Principles | Link Rot | Liquid Design | PDF | ROI | Writing, Reading & Content | Articles & Related Links —Usability (The Net Place) Great collection of links to practical online articles on each of the above subjects.
She was witty, sexually adventurous and intimate with her readers, sharing photos of her travels and exchanging private e-mails and instant messages with fans. She posted messages to other people’s Web logs and created personal profiles at social networking sites. Many readers felt deeply connected to her. Then, three weeks ago, the “Plain Layne” Web…
I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey’s palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a…
U.S. investigators said on Wednesday they had arrested an America Online employee and a Las Vegas marketer for stealing the Internet provider’s customer list and selling it to a purveyor of “spam” e-mail. —Andy Sullivan —US Charges AOL Worker Sold Customer List for Spam (AP|MyWay)
Retro video gaming has become something of a pop culture phenomenon lately, with video game music and themes featured in television commercials for Hummer and Saturn sport utility vehicles. A top 20 R&B hit, “Game Over (Flip)” by Lil’ Flip features sound effects from “Pac-Man.” It’s not just nostalgia that’s fueling retro video interest, says…
blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That’s because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it’s…
The U.S. Army, riding the success of its action video game America’s Army, has set up a video-game studio with industry veterans to write other kinds of software to simulate training for a variety of armed forces and government projects. —John Gaudiosi —Army Sets Up Video-Game Studio (Wired)
Blogging is dead, long live blogging. I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they will be right. The act of keeping a “Weblog” as a separate entity will become something of an anachronism. The broader…
Weblogs, Comments, and Law (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) IANAL (“I am not a lawyer”), but here are some links I found interesting. While a newspaper has a responsibility to check the accuracy of letters to the editor, if person A were to start a cafe, and person B walked into the cafe and made statements that the…
What If… There Were No IF? An Alternative History of Games, sans Crowther’s Colossal Cave (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) During a break in the Princeton video game conference a few months ago, David Thomas asked me, what would computer games be like today if Will Crowther hadn’t created Colossal Cave Adventure? I pulled Nick Montfort into the…
Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs’ owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs’ contents. Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a…
Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says. Weblogs, easy-to-use personal journals published on the internet, get children more interested in school work they might otherwise have disliked, says junior school teacher John…
While hardcore online gaming remains the preserve of young men, research firm Screen Digest found that “bored housewives” are fuelling the growth of other games offered on the net. —Net games lure ‘bored housewives’ (BBC) It’s not clear from the article whether the term “bored housewife” is used in the report, or whether it was just…
The bad words we removed, meaning that “The meteor is going to be pissed” was changed to “The meteor is going to be mad.” Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo…
Want to play a game that involves Monty the Mole? Commander Keen? David “Knight Rider” Hasselhoff? With RoN you can. The fact that anyone can freely contribute to the series means that its potential for growth is unrivaled. Indeed, at the time of writing this article, there have been over sixty RoN games. Even King’s…
I couldn’t have been less interested. The pedagogical approach was entirely vocational. Just as my French and Spanish courses revolved around hypothetical trips to Paris or Madrid (like I was going to get there any time soon), my programming courses were filled with unlikely scenarios that read like a cross between an inter-office memo and…
The National Crime Squad announced today that it is working with the FBI, the Canadian Mounties and the Australian Federal Police to set up what they call “patrols” on the internet. Officers will actively monitor chat rooms used by children where they think paedophiles are likely to be. A logo will come up in the…
Two tales of gender, politics, weblogs, and cybercultureJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Both tales are pretty sad. One is the story of Alexandra Polier, falsely accused of having an affair with Sen. John Kerry. According to Matt Drudge: “In an off-the-record conversation with a dozen reporters earlier this week General Wesley Clark plainly stated: ‘Kerry will implode…
Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, “We won’t be reading any novels…