See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
There is much to celebrate in the development of Weblogging — but the discussion of it is often uncritical and un-ambitious. If Weblogging is the answer, as so many claim it is, what was the question? As with the discussion of electronic voting, there is an assumption that there barriers have been put in the…
The 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition has opened for business. The yearly competition, now celebrating its tenth anniversary, is for short pieces of interactive fiction. At this point IF authors can sign up to take part in the competition, and everyone can learn how to judge the games when they are released in October of this…
It’s been almost thirty years since young Laura and Sandy Crowther sat down at a Teletype and took their first steps into the mysterious subterranean world their father, Will, created for them. Now, if Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction is any indication, Crowther and Woods’s pioneering computer game Adventure and…
In order to gather sufficient resources to support my self, my spouse, and my offspring, I must augment my vision with externally mounted lenses, which I wear on the bridge of my nose. My glasses make me feel professorial; without them, I still feel like an ordinary person pretending to be qualified to teach. But…
Researchers are finding players can make sharper soldiers, drivers and surgeons. Their reaction time is better, their peripheral vision more acute. They are taking risks, finding themselves at ease in a demanding environment that requires paying attention on several levels at once. While there are countless examples of children vegetating in front of the box,…
If you use Google to search for “Judaism”, “Jewish” or “Jewish people”, the results are informative and relevant. So why is a search for “Jew” different? One reason is that the word “Jew” is often used in an anti-Semitic context. Jewish organizations are more likely to use the word “Jewish” when talking about members of…
You may feel excitement or dread — or a combination of the two — if you have been charged with creating a new course about online journalism. It’s a tall order, and as you try to decide what to include in the course, you’re likely to wish you had at least three semesters in which…
Better Dialog BoxJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I recently wrote about a survey with a confusing dialog box… while trying to download a Microsoft update, I came across this dialog box, which does a much better job.
[H]e looked overseas where he could pay $6 an hour instead of $60 for programmers. He hired a large, reputable Indian outsourcing firm a few months ago, then sat back and watched his troubles mount. Not only did the offshore team produce code that was full of bugs, they ran up big bills working overtime…
“Capable of navigating the billions of thoughts, experiences, and emotions that make up the human psyche, the new Yahoo soul-search engine helps users find what’s deep inside them quickly and easily,” Yahoo CEO Terry Semel said. “All those long, difficult nights of pondering your place in this world are a thing of the past.” —Yahoo…
Researchers found that doctors who spent at least three hours a week playing video games made about 37 percent fewer mistakes in laparoscopic surgery and performed the task 27 percent faster than their counterparts who did not play video games…. Rosser has developed a course called Top Gun, in which surgical trainees warm up their…
Infocom is long gone, but never mind. The original Infocom games are available for download at www.latz.org, and also for free play through AIM. A Web programmer named Andrew Baio has written an “AIM bot” that makes it possible. Bots are simple programs that act like a human being who’s subscribed to an instant messaging…
Here at work, one of my co-workers captured a screenshot of the blue screen of death and made that his screensaver. I’m wondering if it is to make people feel bad for him, because if he is behind on a project and his screensaver comes on, then you think ‘poor guy is going to lose…
Lawley is not alone in looking to blogs as a potential escape from the “course as online powerpoint slide” stranglehold of today’s commercial course management systems. Charles Lowe of Cyberdash.com recently published an account of his own experience using open source weblogs (PostNuke) to support his online writing class; in a companion piece he compares…
To cut to the chase: The game industry currently doesn’t believe in “game research”. You’re either working on a shippable product, or you’re bullshitting around. Shippability implies minimizing risk; minimizing risk implies minimizing innovation. There are regions of design space that cannot be reached incrementally. That is, there exist new game genres that can’t be…
Do you know the origin of term BSOD aka ?Blue Screen of Death?? Well, the term ?Blue Screen of Death? was not the original acronym for BSOD. The original term meant the ?Black Screen of Death? and was seen when running under Windows 3.0. A user would attempt to run a DOS application and instead…
The faithful, in order to be more true to the ‘Jedi Code of Honour’, crouch before each other and duck their ‘heads’ down as a mark of respect before enjoining battle. Some people think that’s silly. I thought it was silly, the first time I saw it. Then I saw everybody was doing it. And…
In an online world where bloggers’ frenzied mutual promotion seems increasingly the norm, the Wiki emerges as an oasis of dignified restraint. It was invented in 1995 by Ward Cunningham, who now works for Microsoft. But the underlying idea of the Wiki – a Web page that anyone can edit or even delete – could…
Small academic organizations looking for publicity but lacking the funds for a web designer, teachers interested in exposing their students to feedback from real-world audiences, and individuals who simply like to write may all find weblogs valuable, even outside the setting of a composition classroom. We already see barefoot and pajama-clad students in the classroom;…
Web loggers, or bloggers for short, are that new breed of armchair documentarian, chronicling the day’s events — politics, sports, music, arts, family, dating life, anything — on Web sites that are updated daily, or several times a week. But unlike a newspaper Web site, which brings a new front page with new stories each…