See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
On a web page that I posted in Nov 2000 (on a confusing presidential election ballot that caused controversy in Palm Beach), I included a link to Lycos, a has-been search engine wanna-be, which at the time must have had a convenient way to track backlinks. I haven’t even thought of Lycos for years. The…
Fascinating example of new media journalism: a graphic novel investigative report. The content is noteworthy, too: our lives have already changed now that we regularly give away our privacy in return for various benefits (lower prices, connection to friends). The corporations who use our data benefit more than we do, and many of us now…
Take the background paragraph. It ill-serves everyone. If you know nothing about an ongoing story, it gives you too little history and explanation — how can you possibly hope to catch up on, say, the war in Syria in five lines of type? If you know a story well, this paragraph merely wastes your time and the…
A thoughtful, informative article on the importance of Roberta Williams, co-founder of Sierra Online (an adventure game titan from the 1980s). Drawing from both media archaeology and feminist cultural studies, this contribution first outlines the function Roberta Williams serves as a gendered subject of game history. The remainder of the essay is organized as three…
When we envisioned a journal of visual culture issue on ‘Internet Memes’ over two years ago, we sensed that the best way to be generous to our subject matter was to not presume to know what it would look like. Academic publishing – characterized by its long review periods and labored revision processes – habitually…
A very clever interactive essay that uses embedded game-like simulations to show a point. Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of society. Similar:AI-generated essays are nothing to worry about (opinion)After reviewing 22 AI essays I asked my …AcademiaLessons from the Covington Catholic FlashpointMy social media network includes people …CultureIf You…
“Mobile journalism is … not something you’re going to succeed at super quickly,” Richardson said recently in a Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the practice. Mobile journalism is a process with a learning curve, she said. | Richardson trains youth to report the news using only smartphones,…
I didn’t watch the show (our cable-less TV doesn’t get that channel), but I found his to be a fascinating take on what was wrong with both the concept and the execution of this show. All this forces the question of who the intended audience was for NBC’s production of Peter Pan Live, a three-hour…
Google in US schools, with Chromebook laptop computers overtaking iPads for the first time as the most popular new device for education authorities purchasing in bulk for students. Google shipped 715,500 of the low-cost laptops into US schools in the third quarter, compared with 702,000 iPads, according to IDC, the market research firm. Chromebooks, which…
Wise thoughts. When we look at children spending what appears to be excessive amounts of time watching television and using smartphones, tablets, and other devices, we are often looking through the lenses of our own experiences—memories of reading, playing outside, socializing with friends and family, and seemingly long stretches of time in which we didn’t…
This year I have seen an uptick in the percentage of users who are visiting my website with a mobile device. About a year ago, I introduced a responsive web design on my site, with the idea of making it more friendly to narrow screens. I’m glad that design was already in place before I…
The FBI fabricated a story to look like a news piece with an Associated Press byline about bomb threats against Lacey’s Timberline High School in 2007, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and revealed by the ACLU on Monday. The FBI also created a fake email link “in the style of…
A comic about Seagulls. If you feel like this…. #FriesGate Similar:Always Bet on TextGraydon Hoare offers a rousing hymn to t…CybercultureAI Agents Are Terrible Freelance WorkersAI is getting better at rote tasks, but …BusinessSMS Generator SMS Generator.AmusingThe Blood and the BlameMoments after Donald Trump was…CultureThere are more museums in the US than there are Starbucks and McDonalds…
Although the IF community first formed around Inform, a tool for creating parser-based games of the popular sort released by Infocom (Zork, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, and A Mind Forever Voyaging), tools today are numerous, and many of them bypass the compelling but fricative parser language entirely. For example, in recent years,…
I did enjoy the opportunity to play with Google Glass briefly, and can imagine certain instances (for instance, while crawling through the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky) when having a hands-free recording device would have been really handy. The social questions raised by Google Glass won’t go away; in the near future, when this sort…
I should probably not grant a student superadmingoddessomgwhathaveidone access to a network at 11:59 on Friday night, but I just did. #trust Similar:How Technology Has Changed The Way We WriteSocial media services have put writing t…CultureI just tried Open Shot Video Editor, a free open source toolFor years I used ScreenFlow, which offer…Current_EventsWhy I Left Academe…
I’ve been following the frustrating slow burn that is #Gamergate for some time. I’m planning to introduce it in my online Video Game Culture and Theory class this January. This ground-level introduction will help add context to the mayhem. Until recently, you might have lived a life blissfully unaware of the online #Gamergate movement. But…
Over a hundred years before a monstrous array of vacuum tubes surged into history in an overheated room in Pennsylvania, a properly attired Victorian Gentleman demonstrated an elegant little mechanism of wood and brass in a London drawing room. One of the ladies attending this demonstration brought along the daughter of a friend. She was…
For the past few months, a group inside the Post has been working on a new application that will offer a curated selection of news and photographs from the daily newspaper in a magazine-style, tablet-friendly format. The application will come preinstalled on Amazon’s newly updated Kindle Fire tablet, expected to be launched later this fall…
Did you hear that a shady group of antisocial hackers threatened to release nude pictures of Emma Watson after she gave a highly visible speech at the United Nations? It turns out that was just one of many hoaxes that professional journalists unwittingly helped to propagate last week. By Wednesday, a supposed PR firm had…