See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
“For many of us, creative life goes beyond machines — creativity is built in at a very low level of our personalities, and the joy of building things from imagination, then sharing those experiences with others and watching their reactions — that’s what drives us.” Richard “Lord British” Garriott, inventor of Ultima Online, in an…
College gamers are not necessarily male — or antisocial hermits. And while about one-third of those surveyed admitted playing computer games during class, the games generally don’t conflict with their studies, says the researcher who conducted the survey for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. —Study: Gamers Not Reculsive Nerds (Wired) The full report is…
“Set to gather at 7 p.m. at Grand Central Station for what promised to be an elaborate ‘mob ballet,’ the crowd of about 250 was greeted by a ‘huge’ police presence, according to the Mob Project’s anonymous organizer known only as Bill. | Bill said the mob moved to the Grand Hyatt next door instead.…
Steven Johnson describes the emotional interface over There. The software translates common emoticons and other abbreviations (such as LOL for “laughing out loud”) into gestures and expressions. It also automatically parses a small subset of words: If you type yes, your avatar will nod its head. Most of the time users convey emotion by typing…
“Television, news papers, books, magazines, and other media perform a task of educating, informing, editorializing, advertising and marketing. In each of those domains, the individual is checked, editorialized, authorized and managed to repress what is truly individual and express a view acceptable for that medium at that time. This new medium is a unique medium,…
“What no one imagined — least of all The Sims’ designers — was that thousands of players would quickly bypass the album’s intended use and instead use it to create dozens of staged snapshots, crafting what can be complex, scripted, multi-episode social commentaries, graphic novels or even movies, as it were, with the Sims starring…
“The main concept behind Eon of Tears is that the player will get a shot at the biggest events in the Bible: unleashing the ten plagues of Egypt, seeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, leading the conquest of Canaan, or performing some of the miracles as Jesus-Christ. Basically we are taking a look at…
“For years, Hormel Foods Corp. has watched as the name of its famous product has come to mean junk e-mail, a source of heartburn for computer users. | Now Hormel is asserting its trademark rights, filing complaints against Spam Arrest LLC, a Seattle technology company that provides spam-blocking software.” Jonathan Krim —Hormel’s pique e-rupts over…
“I think he more closely resembles a very clever script, which writes personal emails and funny comments to its blogposts, but has as its main function to scoure the web searching for things to link to from its blog. It is an extremely clever script that grades papers and applies for jobs, and convinces undergraduate…
“Though it may seem like a more recent creation, the pixel first appeared in New Jersey in 1954, the same year that Elvis cut his first record and the transistor radio was invented. At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, mathematicians and engineers created the first computer graphic–and the first instance of digital typography–on a computer…
“Lawmakers, consumer advocates and Internet industry officials gathered for the latest in a string of discussions on harmonizing international laws to cut back on spam, which now accounts for nearly half of all global e-mail. Spam has become a hot-button issue for politicians and business officials, who worry that unless it’s criminalized, spamming could become…
“It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn’t think twice about doing…. They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think – so they take a quick snap with their mobile phone camera and send everybody…
“I’m closing OpenContent because I think Creative Commons is doing a better job of providing licensing options which will stand up in court. As I close OpenContent, I join Creative Commons as Director of Educational Licenses. Now I can focus in on facilitating the kind of sharing most interesting to me – that which supports…
“The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Tuesday that Web loggers, website operators and e-mail list editors can’t be held responsible for libel for information they republish, extending crucial First Amendment protections to do-it-yourself online publishers. | Online free speech advocates praised the decision as a victory. The ruling effectively differentiates conventional news media,…
“The easier it is to find places with good information, the less time users will spend visiting any individual website. This is one of many conclusions that follow from analyzing how people optimize their behavior in online information systems.” Jakob Nielsen —Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster (Alertbox) I’m guessing Nielsen has…
“We?re quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that’s how we treat e-mail now. But imagine…
“A weblog, also known as a *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so that the reader sees the most recent post first. The style is typically personal and informal. Freely available tools on the World Wide Web make it easy for anybody to publish their own…
Hurrah for the National Do Not Call Registry website. But wait… “A person who wants to be included on the list will receive an e-mail from the government, then must send back an e-mail reply as confirmation. But a problem’s arisen, as at least one major processor of e-mail — Yahoo — is blocking the…
“Google Inc., want to know how to compete with Microsoft? Endear yourself to us all. Listen to the likes of us the little people of the Internet. Make the toolbar cross-platform and you will endear yourself to all of us. Change the ‘BlogThis!’ to enable us to blog to whatever blog tools we use. When…
“The Vatican has revealed it has taken on a team of experts to protect the Pope’s website which is attacked by some 10,000 viruses a month and at least 30 mainly American hackers every day.” —Pope Moves against Hackers (ABC – Austrailia)