Movable Mena?
Movable Mena?Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Six hundred trackbacks, and Six Apart backtracks… partly.
Words Matter: Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum
First, words have rules. The mansion of the Word Wizard has many rules. The game of Ad Verbum also has rules. Much of the problem-solving and puzzle-unpuzzling of the text is in recognizing the rules in play and using them to get out of sticky situations. In fact, the player (via text) and adventurer (via…
The role of play
These games aren’t much fun to play, even if you are a Bush supporter. Nevertheless, it’s significant that a major political party now sees games as a useful campaigning tool. Presumably, the RNC thinks Tax Invaders will get Bush’s economic policy across to “the kids”. But it’s hard to say for certain because, so far,…
WordPress
WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your software, not fight it. —WordPress Well, that’s enough MT freakout for today. Still waiting to hear back form SixApart.
Re:Good example of why open source != free
mmmmmmm Free beer….. GULP GULP GULP.. mmm MORE free beer GULP GULP GULP… (footstep) (footstep) (footstep) “HEY! stop blocking the bathroom door man, i gotta pee… What do you mean its $25 to use the bathroom!!! This is an OUTRAGE!!!” —Re:Good example of why open source != free (Slashdot) Movable Type isn’t an open source product,…
Google to sell banner ads
Search giant Google plans for the first time to sell ads that include images, a surprise reversal for a company that has won regard for its pioneering use of text-only marketing pitches and for keeping its home page religiously free of banner advertising. —Google to sell banner ads (ZD Net) I’m still waiting to hear back…
CCCC Waves and Ripples
I’m such an important blogger that I don’t have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link. [W]hen famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren’t really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they’ve already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first…
Pattern Recognition: F:F:F must have very low traffic.
Pattern Recognition: F:F:F must have very low traffic. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It just occurred to me that for someone who’s supposedly a core member of the online group F:F:F, Cayce Pollard doesn’t really spend that much time reading or posting. I’ve spent most of this academic year away from the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, and as I finished…
Education Arcade, day 1
Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).…
Tough Love: Can a video game be too hard?
What’s the point? What adult has the time to master this stuff? Could it ever be worth it? Recently, I’ve decided the answer is yes, even if you’re reduced to tears by a hellish game, it can be worth it to plug through. Why? For the same reason it’s often worth struggling through many other…
Much ado about nothing: Web logs are everywhere and full of nothing
A blog is a Web site with regularly updated chronological entries containing commentary, opinions, lies, rumors, half-truths and innuendos. More importantly, it’s where you can express your opinions, make comments, spread rumors, tell lies, create fiction and bore the world with your thoughts on just about any subject. […] In a lot of ways, reading…
Digital Proof, Human Source
Imagine how quickly the slaughter of innocents at My Lai would have become known had it been captured by a palm-sized digital camera (or phone) instead of reported by letter. What does this mean for journalism? First, it converts all camera-toting participants of an event into potential irrefutable witnesses and therefore sources. Second, these witnesses…
Digital Cameras Change Iraq War Perception
Because digital cameras have features like automatic focus, they have made it easy for anyone to take technically good photographs. “You no longer have to have someone standing in bright sunlight to get a good picture of them,” Howe said. Combine that with Internet connections that have made it easy to send pictures in seconds,…
Surf's Down as More Netizens Turn to RSS for Browsing
After a couple of hours of subscribing to favorite feeds, your news grazing habits will be changed forever. Just as TiVo lets you watch TV more efficiently, RSS readers do the same by letting you scan your favorite blogs and news sites faster or letting you cast your net over a wider range of material.…
Let Down by Academia, Game Pioneer Changed Paths
As a graduate student in 1980, Ms. Buckles became captivated by computers, and spent three to four hours a day using e-mail, a form of communication little known at the time outside universities and government. Although she didn’t play Adventure, she saw it as an emerging literary form that deserved attention, and she began interviewing…
Janet Murray responds to Nick Montfort
So IF has certain intrinsic design difficulties, a built-in awkwardness in the way it represents spatial navigation and the inconsistency with which it handles language. And yet it continues to draw devoted practitioners and interactors. It is, in Montfort‘sview, a still vibrant tradition. Why does IF work despite these design difficulties? Perhaps the answer lies…
Espen Aarseth Responds [to Murray's First Person essay]
While there might be a future for narrative and new forms of storytelling in this cornucopia of new digital and cultural formats, the largest potential seems to be in new types of games, forms that blend the social and the aesthetic in creative ways and on an unprecedented scale. As a new generation of gamers…
Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies
Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game StudiesJerz’s Literacy Weblog) In a comment attached to my blog entry on The Muse of the Videogame, Eyejinx makes an excellent point, an excerpt from which is below: Unless and until those involved in game studies seriously work with the development process (and perhaps the developers themselves), any proposals…
Sexy and Battery-Operated, She's Too Good to Be True
Soon Phyllis has figured out how to use Ellery’s credit cards, order a cookbook and prepare a purée of parsnips for the neighbors. “Phyllis was grandstanding as a newlywed,” Ellery tells himself. “Was that good or bad?” Either way, it’s all too appropriate to the six-person dinner party under way. It later turns out that…
Preliminary results of survey of musicians
An online survey of 2,755 musicians and songwriters shows they are quite divided in their opinions about the impact of music file sharing by Internet users. There is no clear consensus regarding the effects of online file-sharing on artists. Some 35% of this sample agree with the statement that file-sharing services are not bad for…