See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has cooperated with a game developer to produce a Second Life memorial to Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass,” a series of state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots in 1938). I haven’t visited the site yet, but it looks like there’s a deliberate attempt to distance the player from the experience, by casting the…
That may be the best headline I’ve seen on all the coverage related to the KFC teen girls sink bath MySpace photo story, but note that the <title> of the page is the more informative “KFC Bath Prank: Three Girls Fired From California KFC After Bathing In Restaurant Sinks.” The photos themselves are silly, rather…
Philipp Lenssen at “Google Blogoscoped” spotted a change in Google’s panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in. Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording “Report a concern” at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading “Report inappropriate image” –…
Called Muxlim Pal, it allows Muslims to look after a cartoon avatar that inhabits the virtual world. Based loosely on other virtual worlds such as The Sims, Muxlim Pal lets members customise the look of their avatar and its private room. Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal’s creators hope it will also foster…
This interesting post on WRT ponders the case of I Love You, Beth Cooper, a novel that presents its protagonist, Denis Cooverman, with a status bar. Like a health meter, the reader knows how much body Dennis has remaining at any given time. Reading the book becomes the experience of seeing how far we can…
Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I’ve begun to call “the T-shirt economy”–paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today’s smart artists are simply adapting…
Douglas Engelbart gave an earth-shaking demo 40 years ago today. The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelbart used to control an onscreen pointer in exactly the same way we do today. For a world used to thinking of computers as impersonal boxes that read punched cards, whir awhile, then spit out…
A new generation of wired politicos will give journalists much fodder for scandal, but isn’t this making it a bit too easy for them? Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The…
China continued to be world’s worst jailer of journalists, a dishonor it has held for 10 consecutive years. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five jailers from among the 29 nations that imprison journalists. Each of the top five nations has persistently placed among the world’s worst in detaining journalists. At least 56 online journalists are jailed worldwide,…
More and more users are spending more and more time on social networking sites, but the study found they aren’t very responsive to ads there: Clickthrough rates were reported to be far lower than at other sites. On the web in general, nearly 80 percent of users clicked on at least one ad in the…
“It might surprise parents to learn that it is not a waste of time for their teens to hang out online,” said Mizuko Ito, University of California, Irvine researcher and the report’s lead author. “There are myths about kids spending time online – that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that…
A federal jury delivered a mixed verdict today convicting a Missouri mother of misdemeanor charges in a nationally watched cyber-bullying case in which the woman was accused of using a fake MySpace account to torment a teenage girl who later committed suicide. The jurors, however, rejected more serious felony charges against Lori Drew, 49, who…
Jason Scott has started a new blog that will discuss the progress of his documentary, GET LAMP. Here’s a good entry on the contents of Steve Meretzky’s basement. As part of the GET LAMP project, I’ve been collecting artifacts and images throughout the commercial heydays of text adventures, and nobody got bigger than Infocom in…
A poll is just a starting point for discussion, not an ending point that proves any one argument. With that in mind… Results indicate that the Internet is the most trusted news source among all age groups, and overall, more trusted than newspapers and television news combined. FOX News is the most trusted news source…
How long has this been around? I just noticed it. Google’s user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven’t had the chance to play with it. I’m not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google’s search results, so I’m going to have to read up…
Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams. We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I…
It’s pretty cool to see a Chronicle of Higher Education blog covering text games: It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out…
[G]ames are inherently about exploration, in the abstract sense of discovering strategies and options, seeing how rules interact and so on. And yes, you can summon screenshots of Warhammer halls bigger than the Taj Mahal, or mountain vistas in Lord of the Rings Onlinethe Other: societies wholly different from mine, cultures built on assumptions so…
Wired reviews Mirror’s Edge When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you’re vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you’re looking at your…
The votes have been tabulated, and we have our winners! Congratulations to the top three games, Violet, Nightfall, and Everybody Dies, as well as to all authors for entering. And a big note of thanks to everyone who judged the games. The full results are available below. (IF Comp 08) See the results page.