See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
I’m gearing up to teach Video Game Culture and Theory for the third time. It’s a 200-level elective, with no prerequisites. Students will have taken a basic comp course, but some won’t have done any academic research yet. I’m conscious that some students may have difficulty switching from playing the games they want to play,…
The first part of a walkthrough of the classic (1993), a moody, contemplative point-and-click adventure that defies the stereotype of games as violent and chaotic. Popular with women and causual gamers, but also appreciated by expert gamers for its puzzles and graphics (photo-realistic CGI, with pre-rendered animations), it was the top-selling game for nearly a…
Is this for real? On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. —Amazon.com Hold on, though… who goes online to shop for more books on Dec 25, before the spines have been cracked on the new books that were under the tree? Amazon was heavily promoting its…
Fascinating student project from Zach Whalen’s “A Videogame Canon” course. Adventure. Rules, Representation, and Meaning in Colossal Cave Adventure Analysis of Colossal Cave Adventure Social Impact Colossal Cave Adventure as an interactive narrative and similarites [sic] to fictional novels Other projects include coverage of PONG, Half-Life, and Super Mario Kart.
I’ve re-set and cleansed my psyche a bit over the last week or so, delving into a little visual and spatial creativity, rather than the reading and writing (and marking) that I’ve been doing for the previous few weeks. While his face is still cartoony, the craggy eyes, puffy cheeks, and red nose all required…
Long story on the epic fail that is (was) Duke Nukem Forever. The Duke Nukem Forever team was unusually small; by 2003, only 18 people were working on it full time. This might have been adequate back when the game was announced in the mid-’90s. But in the years that Broussard had spent tweaking Duke…
In the late-eighties and early nineties, electronic writers wrote hypertext fiction and poetry, the classic example being afternoon, a story by Michael Joyce. In hypertext literature the narrative unfolds through a long series of links that produce different outcomes — but now the shrapnel of the technological explosion includes hundreds of sub-categories, each completely unique.…
I was showing my 7yo daughter some classic arcade games. She asked if I could teach her to make a game of her own, and proceeded to describe the premise. You are a water sprite, catching fish and avoiding sharks. Blowing bubbles at the fish makes you lure them in; blowing a bubble at a…
Good overview of the concepts Johnson explores in his book Everything Bad is Good for You.
I completely missed this, which I stumbled across via the Reeves Library blog. Previously, we only offered Personalized Search for signed-in users, and only when they had Web History enabled on their Google Accounts. What we’re doing today is expanding Personalized Search so that we can provide it to signed-out users as well. This addition…
Some interesting synergy in my feed reader this morning. The hidden story of the 3D engine – by the people who write them Videogames are beautiful now. It’s not the figurative beauty of yore – the iconic charm of Pac-Man, the elegiac simplicity of the vector-mapped space craft in Elite. Modern games are edging toward…
In honor of my spilling spiced wine on myself at a faculty social, while excitedly responding to a question about Charles Babbage, Matt Hoy sent me a link to this awesome Ada Lovelace webcomic.
I would have trimmed about 20 seconds, or given the two lackeys more to do. Still, “The Tetris God” is worth a chuckle.
It’s an open debate whether the plan to scan millions of books and make them searchable online will prove the benefit to humanity that Google promises – or hand it a monopoly over certain digital works, as opponents allege. But the consensus is the company fomented an avoidable backlash by forging ahead with its controversial…
“The idea that a lot of people have of Wikipedia is that it’s some emergent phenomenon–the wisdom of crowds, swarm intelligence, that sort of thing… like we’re a lot of ants, working in an anthill,” Jimmy Wales, the site’s co-founder, has said. “It’s kind of a neat analogy, but it turns out it’s actually not…
Alex Reid offers his commentary on this Sports Illustrated promotional video, that imagines how the magazine experience might work on a color tablet reader. In this YouTube video, the WonderFactory and Time present the “future of the magazine” (including more interactive advertisements, oh goody). Hmmm…. I wonder if the future of Sports Illustrated (the magazine)…
It’s fairly common for speakers at high-tech events to give their talks in front of a screen that displays a Twitter stream. The snarky backchannel compliments a speaker whose goal is to be provocative or entertaining, but what happens when the speaker is aiming for subtlety and complex understanding? Here’s a story of how the…
Atari Arcade is the place to find beloved Atari classics including Asteroids and Lunar Lander. You can play them all here online, any time and free of charge. —Atari.com My kids came over to my laptop, attracted to the chirps and beeps of these games. My 11yo son shooed me away from the keyboard and…
OK, asking 250 students to post questions on Twitter during a class doesn’t risk life or limb. But it can cause ego damage if the mob of students in his course on personal finance gets disorderly online. —Chronicle Teaching with technology changes the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship, putting more control in the hands of…
Fascinating new development, as Microsoft and big media align themselves against Google. [T]he Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine. News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment. One website publisher approached…