See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
In the 20th Century, making the news was almost entirely the province of journalists; the people we covered, or ?newsmakers?; and the legions of public-relations and marketing people who manipulated everyone. The economics of publishing and broadcasting created large, arrogant institutions — call it Big Media, though even small-town newspapers and broadcasters exhibit some of…
What woman could resist a wedding proposal in the form of a brand-new computer? Johnson popped the question by etching the message, “Will you do me the honor?” into the side of the machine.Photo: Courtesy Michael Johnson —With This Rig, I Do Thee Wed (Wired) Found via Work in Progress, where Julie Young prays, “Let…
Miss Dyson, a student careers adviser, thought she was sending a private email to Alex Hewson, her boyfriend. By accidentally clicking on the “reply all” command, however, she distributed it to everyone on his original recipient list. The message went to 30 friends of Mr Hewson, a PR executive with the firm Carat International. Many…
Blips, bloops and beeps emit from the room that houses the exhibit, where a dozen video-arcade games from the late 1970s and ’80s are lovingly arranged in chronological order, each lit with a single spotlight. Three free tokens, good for one game play each, are included with museum admission. Additional tokens may be purchased for…
The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections. While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren’t able to attend the conference, if you’re new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction. Over the past few years,…
Tell your kids, there are more and more ways to make a career out of video games! They could become game designers; they could also play games all the time (or observe other people doing so) for academic research. — Anne Collier —Web News Brief 7 (Net Family News) Tell your kids — maybe it’s not…
FilmCroft: I’m Ready for My Close-upJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections. Jordan Hall’s presentation was the only one that relied heavily on cinema theory, though she showed an admirable awareness of the problems such an approach causes. To take just one example, she suggests that the default method of playing the…
Form, Culture, and Video Game CriticismJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I see that Nick Montfort has already posted a quick overview at GrandTextAuto, so I won’t try to cover everything and every talk equally — instead, I’ll focus on those talks about which I have the most to say (however naive some of my reaction may be).…
Princeton Videogame Conference: PrologueJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Presenters have started to gather for Princeton’s videogame conference. About eight of us met for some socialization last night. On the way home, I misread my map, managed to get myself taken to the wrong Red Roof Inn. This is all rather ironic, since part of my talk covers…
What stinks about the whole affair is not the glee with which Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies (including, apparently, this most recent one) are supplied to him by print journalists who don’t have enough evidence to put them into their…
Today’s computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It’s just like “Space,…
It’s a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. —Jakob Nielsen —Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox) Note… he’s…
So why this terror of the new medium? I don’t think it has much to do with the concern to protect the weak and feeble-minded potential murderers out there. This is all about money. Television is one of the media which has the most to lose, as statistics show that games take time away not…
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to…
The ability of players to interact with games has fundamentally changed them, Lowood said. Computer games, once seen as commercial products or a one-way communication between designer and player, are now seen as a much more open kind of medium that people can contribute to in other ways, he said. “So much of the content…
Most non-arcade games that retain a rabid fan base years after they’ve become technically obsolote fall into one of two categories. They have a obsessively complex world that’s been built up around them (Nethack, say, or tabletop roleplaying games), or they have a simple rule set with much greater depth in the gameplay and strategy…
Games Galore Two interesting Slashdot threads… one is “Gaming Academia Gets More Mainstream Press“, a response to the recent NY Times article on the upcoming Princeton conference, and another is discussion of Magic Words: Interactive Fiction in the 21st Century, a beautiful nine-part article on interactive fiction, featuring interviews with Emily Short, Stephen Granade, Andrew…
“Games are big, big objects,” said Barry Atkins, who teaches in the English department at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. “The days when you could play a couple of hours of Myst and write about it are over.” | Dr. Atkins admitted that he didn’t finish Half-Life before writing about it in his 2003 book,…
Fantasy worlds created by virtual reality have been shown to provide a novel form of relief to patients suffering from intractable pain…. “My pain when the nurse is changing my bandages is consistently extreme… But during the time I was in VR, I was pretty much unaware that the nurse was even working on my…
The magnitude of these effects is also somewhat alarming. The best estimate of the effect size of exposure to violent video games on aggressive behaviour is about 0.26 (Fig. 2). This is larger than the effect of condom use on decreased HIV risk, the effect of exposure to passive smoke at work and lung cancer,…