See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others’ ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. —Jamie McKenzie —The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery…
Users are berated and insulted for not having consulted the documentation, but, in many cases, the user can hardly be blamed. The documentation is shoddy, incomplete, and badly organized, if it’s present at all. Exceptions are becoming rarer and rarer.| As documentation decreases in quality, users stop turning to it. As users stop turning to…
Most newspapers have traditionally not made room for online producers and editors in their newsrooms, shuffling them off instead to a different floor, or to a different building entirely.|But in the past few years, many newspapers have decided that having two newsrooms — one for print and one for online — doesn’t make much sense.…
VOCALOID allows song writers to generate superb authentic-sounding singing on their PCs by simply inputting the words and notes of their compositions. The software synthesizes the sound from “vocal libraries” of recordings of actual singers, such as those being developed by Zero-G, and retains the vocal qualities of the original singing voices to reproduce real-sounding…
Think blogs are useless? Donna, while applying for jobs, got a email back from Central Pa Magazine. They happened to have read her blog and asked her to write a column on food/health for them. Let’s all cross our fingers for her that they ask her to be a regular columnist. | Woo Hoo Donna.…
It’s no coincidence that the most-read blogs are created by professional writers. They have essentially suckered thousands of newbies, mavens, and just plain folk into blogging, solely to get return links in the form of the blogrolls and citations. This is, in fact, a remarkably slick grassroots marketing scheme that is in many ways awesome,…
Not completely yes. First: most obviously, the Memex (had it ever been built) would have operated on photo-mechanical, rather than digital technology. (As you watch the animation, you can hear the machanical operation sound, that sound would be a proof to believe that it is not digital media) Second, the operation of the memex is…
We live in the dark ages of digital media. We fantasize about the infinite possibilities and revolutionary potential of the Web, about how free information wants to be, about uploading our brain to a hard drive — but we actually know less about the creative computing that happened in our lifetimes than some people know…
Nick Montfort’s Twisty Little PassagesLiteracy Weblog) I just ordered my copy of Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction — Nick Montfort’s study of riddles, Adventure, Zork, and beyond.
Their one-star bombs were nasty and relentless?landing at a rate of five a day. My characters were undeveloped, my structure sloppy, my prose trite. There were complaints of money and time wasted and of friends never again to be trusted. Some hated the book so much they were forced to put it down. One argued…
—News-Images.com Pretty self-explanatory — like Google News but for people who don’t want to read. Found on Slashdot.
Reading the news on a computer may soon be passe. Internet-enabled mobile phones and hybrid devices are fueling the next wave of change, and journalists need to know how to deliver content to these devices. —Vivek Shankar —Reporters, readers get new ways to publish and readOnline News Association) This is some light, friendly PR-style coverage…
Aviva, Diageo, Corus… the trend for rebranding companies with “nonsense” names has led to some notable additions to the corporate lexicon. | But a stunt designed to ridicule the tendency has come back to haunt its creators after several spoof names were registered for real. —Spoof brand names snapped up for real (BBC) Thanks for the…
What began as the ultimate outsider activity — a way to break the newspaper and TV stranglehold on the gathering and dissemination of information — is turning into the same insider’s game played by the old establishment media the bloggerati love to critique. The more blogs you read and the more often you read them,…
The good text adventures had more than a series of puzzles to solve; they had as much atmosphere and clever writing as a good novel, and I decided in Grade 8 that I was going to merge my love of writing and computers to become a writer of interactive fiction. I set my sights on…
As delegates arrived at the meeting, they were handed an intelligent tag the size and weight of a PDA to wear around their necks. Called an nTag, each delegate’s device was pre-programmed with the conference schedule, which could be displayed on a small screen on the front of the tag, as well as with personal…
There is clearly a need for CSS to be taken seriously by graphic artists. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The code remains the same, the only…
Microdoc News has now had feedback from more than 100 users of Google Adwords. The response from small advertisers is not convincing that Google AdWords actually works. There are one or two excellent supporters of the Google AdWords idea, but there are also the 88% of small-time advertisers who are having less than stellar results.…
Pcol writes “The Washington Post reports that ‘Spim,’ as people are beginning to call unsolicited instant messages, is the latest sign that online marketers will seek to take advantage of other communication tools, not limiting themselves to spam or pop-up ads. The good news is that it’s not easy for spimmers to send unsolicited instant…
Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC) will offer a Ph.D. in Digital Media, starting fall 2004. The program, one of the first of its kind worldwide, is aimed at educating research-oriented theorist/practitioners who will bring the traditions of the humanities and arts to the design of digital media. Graduates of the program…