See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Now maybe the Huffington Post could be worth more if it further cut its burn rate. For instance, rather than not pay its bloggers, it could charge them — for the privilege of getting to help maintain the jetsetting lifestyle of the Great Arianna, of course. As for some of the people the site does pay, like its tech…
I was digging through my archives and came across this e-mail from caver and author Roger Brucker, responding to my request for anything he might remember about the well house — described so vaguely in Will Crowther’s 1976 game “Colossal Cave Adventure,” but such a real-seeming place. The wellhouse was one of a series of…
A nicely done feature on the closure of the last player-piano roll manufacturer. One machine dates back to the 1880s when it was used to make shoes, and for the past 100 years has made the tabs with brass eyelets used to hook the roll into a piano. There are also aging machines to perforate…
Journalism is changing. Watchdog journalism — the perusal of thousands of pages of official records in search of anomalies and other signs of abuse and corruption — is much harder to do than reporting on celebrity shenanigans or fashion trends. John Mecklin writes: On a disaggregated Web, it seems, people and advertisers simply will not…
Nick Montfort just e-mailed a link to his brilliant textual interpretation of Star Wars. Great use of characters in a purely linear narrative environment.
Gaah! Is there anyone out there who’s experienced with Wikipedia templates, who can help me resolve this mess? I uploaded a screenshot of Will Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure (freeware, c. 1976), but the Wikipedia copyright-protection policies are written for current programs (where the visuals are much more important). Licensing This is a screenshot of…
A former student writes: I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies. Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of…
Admissions officers are looking for the “silver bullet” to uncover the secret to social networking. But, as this latest controversy illustrates, there is no magic solution in a space whose content is controlled by users, and policed by a community. To be part of the conversation of any social network to the point you can…
I haven’t been to the Modern Languate Association’s annual conference in the last several years, in part because the time slot (between Christmas and New Year’s) is horrible if you want to spend time with your family (imagine that!). Some of it is just sour grapes — I pitched a few proposals to the MLA…
I’ve never been a fan of PDF documents, but now that I have a tablet PC, I thought I would try reading a few PDF documents and see how my tablet functions as an e-book reader, mostly for magazines, dissertations, or the occasional advance proof copy that someone wants to share with me. My first…
This came up in my feed reader today. Like me, this gamer prefers stories to mindless shoot-em-ups, and laments the current state of commercial gaming. There’s a lot of hipocrysy in the minds of many gamers today. Almost every gamer I talk to tells me they want games with depth, carefully written storylines, and maginificent…
Raph Koster comments on the internet buzz surrounding a blog entry that went viral. It is like playing a giant game of telephone. Accurate (The Guardian): Game designer Raph Koster picked up on a forum thread about recruitment consultants and WoW. Wrong stuff starts creeping in (Games Campus, which also wins a prize for the…
Owens’s exploits might have been lost to the mists of time if not for an undergraduate student named Jane Browning, who stumbled on the story in a cafe in Gloucester County, Virginia, and tracked down the man behind the legend. You can read more about Owens in his Wikipedia entry and on Ms. Browning’s blog,…
The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by…
For the first time this year, I asked my school to buy me a laptop (a Dell Latitude XT, my first-ever tablet computer). I also asked for a new monitor, and it’s a beauty. I’m pretty pleased with my setup. Of course, it’s fun to set up your office when you don’t have any immediate…
An interesting method of publicizing high-quality science in a form accessible to (and editable by) the general public. RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week, that describes families of RNA molecules. The first paper scheduled is “A…
The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News (both owned by the same corporation) have announced another nail in the coffin of print journalism. Home delivery will be available on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Subscribers will have access to an electronic “e-edition” seven days a week as part of their subscription. This “e-edition” allows you…
That didn’t take long. BoingBoing assembles a collection of digital interpretations of the shoe-tossing incident.
For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into…
Fascinating follow-up to Wednesday’s story about the Linux advocate who posted a bitter diatrabe lamenting the ignorance of a teacher who confiscated a student’s Linux disks and wrote a heartfelt (if misguided) letter insisting that giving away software must be illegal. “Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?” I didn’t even have…