See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Part of an Ars Technica review of Google’s new operating system. Longtime Ars readers may be familiar with my periodic rants about the increasing disutility of the “volume/directory/file” metaphor for modern networked machines. Saving files, copying them, syncing them–this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me. Bravo.
I guess I won’t be linking to any many more NYT articles. NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters
One of my students posted this on her blog… she’ll be presenting it tonight in class. I’m looking forward to it! Here’s a parody, by Meagan Gemperlein At the beginning of the semester, I had blogged about hating blogging, but really in the end it wasn’t that terrible. I came to see how it can…
Via Jay is Games We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we’re calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme “escape”. It’s text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full…
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.” “It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking…
Sadly, I haven’t had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners. Vote Summary Place Game Avg. Std. Dev. No. Votes 1 Rover’s Day Out 7.96 1.65 92 2 Broken Legs 7.39 1.72 92 3 Snowquest 7.37 1.41 101
Many have defined the problem — people are abandoning old media for new in droves — but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium…
Welcome to the “fakeosphere.” Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs – or flogs – fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it’s a $500 million-a-year industry – and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago. “I don’t think…
At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud. Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction. “I’m not sure why…
Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What’s most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that’s a…
I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible. I had already included a link to the…
While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some…
Peter Mawhorter offers up a reading list on games: For anyone curious about what I’ve been reading, here’s the list of what I’ve read to get an introduction to this area: “Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story” by Nicole Lazzaro. “GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games” by…
I don’t usually link to sites that collect a bunch of links and serve them up on a page full of ads, but this is a pretty good list from Squidoo. Here you’ll find the educational sites where my kids play online, and that are most often recommended by other parents who value fun learning…
Will I miss Geocities? No, not really. In 1998 or possibly 1999, I was teaching web authorship as part of a freshman composition class, and this page from a student project made me keep the “make a Geocities home page” and “make a creative hypertext” project around, even though every semester, a certain chunk of…
Looking forward to this promising resource. I’ve wrapped the blogs up, tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset. Chapters…
Great stuff from Mark Marino… not only is the content fascinating, but the blog-sized presentation, for discusison, of a fundamental theoretical concept is a great example of what the blogging medium can do for (and to) scholarship. Item for today: = In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo‘s article on the history of computers, the…
Clearly, the computer re-energized Bukowski and gave him new life as a writer. Yet much of Bukowski’s late writing was about old age and death. The computer fit into this. In poems, letters, and in The Captain, Bukowski chronicled his struggles with the computer. The shutdowns, the lost poems, the time at the shop for…
Although I explained how I track and archive my students’ Twitter activity, I didn’t describe what they actually do on Twitter. That’s because I wasn’t sure myself what they do. I mean, of course I’ve reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn’t considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter.…
When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages–from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening’s plans–being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether. Such noise makes us even…