See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
What can parents do to minimize their children’s risk of being hurt or killed by poison or sharp objects in Halloween candy? How many children would you say die each year from eating poisoned candy (or candy with razor blades and such) each Halloween? Just two or three? Maybe only one every few years? In…
It: nailed. xkcd: Headlines.
Back in my grad school days, I was called a “run-of-the-mill programmer” by a brilliant IT genius. For a guy whose only computer coursework consists of a Pascal class in high school (“taught” by a math teacher who didn’t know the language, and checked my answers against those in the teacher’s manual), I still consider…
Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media company? A logistics machine? The mystery of its strategy is deepened by two factors. First is the company’s communications department, which famously excels at not communicating. Three requests to speak with Amazon officials for this article were delayed and, inevitably, declined. This moves discussions of the…
A new Emily Dickinson archive is online. Here is the opening of one of her most famous poems. Reading View for Fascicle 23.
I’m getting ready to introduce my freshman writing students to college-level research, so I found it helpful to read this brief introduction to the internal problems Wikipedia creates for itself. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the…
I can’t quite understand a world in which people will pay $4 for a cup of coffee… So I have no particular interest in coffee-shop culture, but the unrelenting advance of automation is worth noting. But note the word “could” in the headline. The Briggo coffee kiosk knows how to make a perfect coffee because…
EL231 “Digital Storytelling” (Dec 18-Jan 22) Unit 1 (Dec 18-22) mostly experiencing digital stories (reading, watching, listening, playing, whatever), and reading articles & discussing them online. (We take a break Dec 23-Jan 1: no classes, no homework.) Unit 2 (Jan 2-7) trying out 4-5 tools for creating digital stories, and learning two in a little…
Much of the criticism of Healthcare.gov has come from people who are fundamentally opposed to the idea of a government-mandaded website that manages the individual citizen’s purchase of health insurance from private providers. So, while I have been following with shock and dismay the horror stories (long waits, incomprehensible error message, unhelpful live chats, unpopulated…
To make a quick buck by annoying your online readers, alienate and frustrate them by breaking your silly compilation article up into 10 or more parts you expect them to click through sequentially, and don’t provide an “all on one page” view. Congratulations! You’ll make a few bucks, and you’ll increase the sum total of…
I hate your blog. Your recipe for vegan eggnog is stupid. I hissed and I booed it, and then eschewed it, never made it once. Yes, your blog roll is a confederacy of dunces. It abuts less interesting links in your posts. Hamsters that dance! I’m not engrossed. I’m not opposed to your collection of…
To tweet or not to tweet from your seat in the theater? #tcpgh13 @THATCampPGH amt-lab.org/blog/2013/07/t…
Here is an example of how I teach with Inform 7. jerz.setonhill.edu/blog/2012/11/1… @THATCampPGH #tcpgh13
I haven’t tried GameSalad yet… and won’t even download it until at least after I’ve submitted midterm grades next week, but it looks very promising. (I haven’t yet exhausted the possibilities of Scratch, but since Scratch games don’t work on an iPad, I’m looking at alternatives.) GameSalad Creator is a powerful game design and mobile…
Jon Ingold describes the gamelike storytelling philosophy of Inklewriter. (I’ll be teaching a “Digital Narrative” creative writing class in J-Term, so I’m on the lookout for resources.) Our stories tend not be about “choosing what happens” – if readers wanted to control a story, they could write one of their own! Instead, the idea is…
But luckily for you, one does not need to go to the Folger Library in DC to see these pieces of history; they live online as well. And, in some cases, online they are even more enchanting. Take, for example, the Wenceslaus Hollar map. In person, it’s lovely, but online, it’s amazing. Go ahead and…
So what if every reader survey ranked international news coverage near the bottom of what people wanted to read? Didn’t they know our Africa correspondent had just won a Pulitzer Prize for international reporting? People needed international reporting even if they were too ignorant to recognize it, and we were determined to give it to…
Sadly, the people who are spending (and receiving) the huge sums of money to support the dehumanization of essay-grading are not the ones who will be swayed by an appeal to the humanities. Once the use of automated essay grading becomes common knowledge, the implicit message will be hard to miss. For any self-aware, warm-blooded…
Welcome to IFComp 2013, the competition for short text adventures! The games are available! You can play them online or download them for offline play. About the Competition For the last eighteen years, the members of the Interactive Fiction community have held a yearly interactive fiction competition. For fans of the old Infocom games as well as for…
“Real-time” conversations are emerging as the new battleground for competing social networks Facebook and Twitter, and for their advertisers. While Twitter has been beefing up its ad business in advance of its stock market debut, Facebook has been adding features such as hashtags – words or phrases that represent a topic of discussion – and…