See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Even as the use of electronic media has become common across fields for research and teaching, what is taken for granted among young scholars is still foreign to many of those who sit on tenure and promotion committees. In an effort to confront this problem, the MLA and a consortium called the Humanities, Arts, Science…
The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort. Each artist’s work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective. Here we make, remake, shape and reshape. Steve Ersinghaus :: Story Carianne Garside ::…
Photopia unceremoniously dumped the idea of a ‘puzzle-based’ narrative in favour of what it called a ‘story-based’ narrative, a linear progression (linear in terms of interactivity, not time) from beginning to end that throws seemingly random fragments of a story at the player, which slowly start to weave into one another and create a cohesive…
If you’re a fan of lifehacking, you’ll already be familiar with some of these issues. I’m blogging this because it’s a good example of doing justice to an opposing view, giving a good presentation of the strongest objections to multitasking. If the pundits clogging my RSS reader can be trusted (the ones I check up…
This article does a good job reminding us how the world of media has changed in the past few decades. The metaphors we use to think about changes in media have a lot to tell us about the particular moment we’re in. McLuhan talked about media as an extension of our central nervous system, and…
New media researcher and capital-letter-avoider dana boyd recently answered questions about teens and their use of social media. These folks will be in college soon, so it makes sense for us to learn about their media habits. @mirroredpool: What borders to teens place of social networking sites and education? How would they react to using…
I recently submitted a conference proposal on cloud computing. Google said in a blog post the outage came down to a simple traffic jam at an Asian data center. The search giant described the situation by using the analogy of a large number of airplanes being rerouted through one airport that was not equipped for…
Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month. One of the more unusual plays in this year’s Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the…
[C]ourse-management software has become a new kind of campus building–a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of “hybrid” courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are. Colleges don’t want to just buy these online classrooms out of a catalog.…
Several of my students created videos for class projects. EL200 Jessie Krehlik: Self Defense Videos (with Aero Windwalker) Jessie Farine: Suis La Lune Review Rebecca Marrie created this YouTube Channel, which I hope we can use to sort all the SHU student projects I hear about in the future. I have one independent study project…
A big part of my work as a freshman writing instructor seems to be convincing students that I really do mean it when I explain that Googling to “find quotes” to support an opinion you’ve already committed to paper is not the same thing as doing academic research with peer-reviewed sources. I also find that…
I dislike the term “digital native.” I mean no offense to Marc Prensky, who popularized it (along with its counterpart, “digital immigrant”), but the term is laden with colonial baggage, though as a humanities person I’m perhaps hypersensitive to that sort of thing. More important, the term also misses an important point. Today’s technologically savvy…
I recall deciding not to blog about an unpublished study that reported a correlation between lower grades and higher Facebook usage, though I did make a mental note of how some of the coverage was confusing correlation with causation. A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in…
While hiding from the stack of final papers, I took a break in the cafeteria. Some of my colleagues were talking about the new Star Trek movie, and the conversation shifted to what’s on TV now. My daily household duties include putting the kids to bed. My wife doesn’t really do mornings, and homeschooling doesn’t…
I’m sitting in the back of a meeting where the speaker has spent 40 minutes tracking down a technical glitch interrupting his presentation. Happily, the room has wireless access… Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom (aka Rogue), created in the early 1980s[1] by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, is an intriguing game for many reasons.…
A great little indie game by Daniel Benmergui. The game is also a poem. Today I Die
Wonderfully technical discussion of interactive fiction programming issues, presented by Andrew Plotkin at Penguicon 7. Coding is art, art is code. As I write this, Inform 7 is approaching its third birthday. I7 is a tool for creating interactive fiction (text adventure games). Like all the most powerful IF development tools, I7 is a programming…
“We’re going to become a 24-hour, local news-gathering media company so we can more effectively gather content and distribute it among our different platforms: print, online and mobile,” [Baltimore Sun] spokeswoman Renee Mutchnik said. — Washington Times Reporters are reporting on how other news organizations are reacting to changes in the field of journalism. It’s…
Yes, that’s right, I’ve quit Facebook. After being a member for over three years–since its expansion to all colleges and universities in September 2005–I decided to deactivate my account. Why would I do such a thing? Hmph, funny you should ask. —Karissa Kilgore When I finally got around to joining Facebook about a year ago,…
The St. Cloud Times gives retrogaming its due, with this profile of Matt Barton. The most common misconception about video gamers is that they are young teenagers who absorb everything negative that the most violent games offer. Matt Barton has another take. The 30-something English professor at St. Cloud State University considers himself to be…