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 heard about Bloxorz this afternoon at a meeting. This evening, I came down to the study where my kids were playing Lego Indiana Jones for the umpteenth time, and without any fuss, started playing Bloxorz on the laptop. Within thirty seconds, my six-year-old daughter was begging to play it. Within two minutes, my ten-year-old…
So what exactly are the barriers of entry for great thinkers (or groups of thinkers) to leave their mark on games? What must happen for games — or interactive entertainment, if you will, to mature as a medium? While no one knows the answer to this question, many people (and companies) have stepped up to…
The web today is not the same as it was during the last presidential election. Old media, apparently, can learn new media tricks. Not since 1960, when John F. Kennedy won in part because of the increasingly popular medium of television, has changing technology had such an impact on the political campaigns and the organizations…
When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No…
Via The FPP — first-person painter! I wish the creator hadn’t chosen to go eerie with the mood, that seems like cheating a little… it’s so easy to go scary. Still, it’s beautiful And it’s an XNA-developed title. Interesting. The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.
The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day. CSM This paper doesn’t offer the typical flighty, bloggy online chatter that tends to dilute…
Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk? “Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution…
My colleague David Stanley links to this article. Many people, especially academic experts, have argued that Wikipedia’s articles can’t be trusted, because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. The reason is that Wikipedia’s community of more than seven million…
Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character. The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data. (BBC) Thanks for the link, Robert.
Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over. Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most…
My provost just sent this link to me and some faculty from computer science and theater, all of whom I’ve already spoken with, very informally, about some kind of collaboration. Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to…
I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo’s “Top Questions” is “What happened to my profile?” but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful “Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!” page, which does not actually answer the question. Another question is “What happened to my alias profile?“,…
Via Karissa: Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim’s Facebook page. On that page was a picture of her at a fancy dress party. She was smiling. Here are some of the lawyer’s touching words in describing the victim: “What we have is a person who has post traumatic…
A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn’t recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and…
Thanks to Nick Montfort for posting this gem: Posted by Stephen Totilo on 10/8/08 at 12:00 pm. “Lost” creator J.J. Abrams may not have have felt like explaining the smoke monster to MTV News movies reporter Josh Horowitz during an interview taped a few feet from my desk last week. But he both offered to…
Seton Hill recently won a multimillion dollar instruction technology grant, part of which includes funding for a new technology specialist (which will become a permanent job when the grant ends). In helping to write the job notice, I drafted the “you-attitude” paragraphs, with the references to Bioshock and lolcats. Our grant will fund the creation…
In a Ph.D. thesis called “The Paradox of the Guided User,” a dutch researcher examined the productivity of users who were dependent on computers, and users who had a pen-and-paper alternative. The article doesn’t link to the full dissertation, so it’s risky to extrapolate beyond the quotes in the article, so I’ll just repeat a…
That’s the story that’s been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books.…
My provost just sent some of my colleagues a link to this article on games and literacy: But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up…
Beautiful, beautiful 1980s introduction to “sophisticated word-processor” technology.