See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
A Mark Twain short story, written in 1898, and set a few years into the future, posits the global ubiquity of a new device called the “telelectroscope,” which lets people around the world see and hear each other. The author, a journalist and a social reformer, explored how an innocent man might save himself from a…
At GDC 2015, noted interactive fiction game designer Emily Short (Galatea, Counterfeit Monkey) gave a microtalk on how to create a protagonist that is interesting, engaging and will stimulate your players. —Gamasutra
Verizon has experimented with journalism before, briefly running Sugarstring — where reporters were banned from covering issues like government surveilance and net neutrality (topics in which Verizon is a newsmaker). Verizon buying AOL gives the biggest US wireless carrier access to AOL’s successful digital advertising service and content including the Huffington Post news website. —CS…
One of journalism’s most treasured clichés, spouted by seasoned editors who ruthlessly slash other clichés from stories, is: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” But the cliché doesn’t tell the journalist, or humanitarian professional, how to check it out. Verification is the essence of journalism, but it also illustrates the difficulty…
The company SwiftKey analyzed more than a billion pieces of emoji data, organized by language and country. According to SwiftKey’s chief marketing officer, Joe Braidwood, the results were fascinating. Here’s a sample of what researchers found: People are mostly likely to send happy faces: “The overall thing we noticed is that 70 percent of all…
Just as young people in journalism school five years ago learned that Twitter was important to reporting, soon enough they might be learning how to film with a 360-degree camera. The same goes for documentary filmmakers. “As these younger journalists are coming out of J-school they’re all learning how to use every single way of…
This will be my self-reward when I finish all my obligations for the term. For the uninitiated, here’s the rundown. In Broken Age, players control two characters: Vella, a young girl who’s about to be sacrificed to an ancient monster called Mog Chothra, and Shay, a teenage boy who was raised in a spaceship by…
We didn’t start the flame war. Scandalous satirical pamphlets were once cranked out by writers and sold at train stations, like so many primordial blog posts. Political cartoons have a long and vicious history. Incivility is our legacy, not our invention. It is part, but only part, of who we are. And have always been.…
Interesting news for historians of digital culture. I had no direct knowledge of this game. I want to learn more about it. Wander was probably the first computer game that is recognisable as what came to be known as a “text adventure” (or “interactive fiction“) – pre-dating even ADVENT (a.k.a. Colossal Cave) by Crowther and Woods! But Wander was more than…
Great story of nerdiness and discovery and friendship, focusing on the author’s adult memories of his love for a particular text adventure game at a crucial phase of his youth. I’ve collected several such stories in “Interactive Fiction Reflection and Nostalgia.” He knew the game, practically had it memorized. He would be the computer. I…
However, running parallel to the evolution of these [graphic] games was a family of explicitly, un- ashamedly narrative titles. Colossal Cave Adventure (Crowther & Woods, 1977), Zork I (1980), and Adventureland (Andventure International, 1978) have equal importance in the evolution of video games, but rarely receive the same kind of general, mainstream popular cultural appreciation…
Are screenshorts slowly killing blogging as we know it? For some things, I think so, because it’s an easier and more authentic way to reach your fans, friends or followers directly on social media than it is to spend time setting up a blog and then sharing out the link. Sharing text as an image…
This author did a great job articulating the unease I felt when I learned about Apple’s racially diverse emoji. I don’t like it when interfaces translate my textual emoticons ;-) into graphic symbols. Now I feel like I’ll have to think deliberately about whatever color the autocorrect chooses for those graphics. Because I’m black, should I…
A hypertext choose-your-own adventure narrative set at a board meeting at a game development company. You are the lead writer on a game that is going straight to hell. And guess who has to fix it? I clicked through out of curiosity and kept clicking. Very enjoyable.The Writer Will Do Something by Matthew S. Burns.
This is nice, but what I really want to see is an Elizabethan-style revenge play featuring Clippy. December 9, 1968… in an underground convention center in the heart of San Francisco, Doug Engelbart gave The Mother Of All Demos, introducing the world to an astonishing slew of technologies including word processing, video conferencing, windows, links,…
But, in addition to symbolizing despair, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ can be wielded as a Zen-like tool to accept the chaos of universe. Meditate on its wide eyes and upturned mouth; that’s not the expression of a quitter, it’s the carefree face of #blessed, radical openness. —The Awl.
The Daily Dot proceeded to shrug the GIF off, chalking it up as an unconventional “no comment.” But the YouTube rep then got back in touch a day later, demanding they include it in their story. No it’s not a joke, he said — “the GIF really is our official response, it technically wasn’t a decline…
Scott Adams (creator of “Adventureland,” the first commercial home computer game) just posted this on his Facebook page: Hey Scott, Something you may not be aware of is the seminal role you played in the genesis of Max Headroom. There was a TRS80 at my place of work. When folks went home a few of…
Today’s viewers don’t differentiate between "traditional" and "digital." Today’s viewers watch what they want, when they want. The average consumer is not thinking about whether it’s scripted or unscripted, user-generated or premium. They care that it’s funny, interesting, gripping or cool. Brands need to recognize the power of those four adjectives, and take risks alongside…