See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
This article from eSchoolNews does a good job emphasizing some of the relevant lessons from a recent Pew report: For most media outlets that reported on an important new survey measuring the impact of technology on teens’ writing skills, the big news from the survey was that emoticons and text-messaging abbreviations are creeping into students’…
The idea isn’t new, but the phrasing is clear and effective. Todd Alcott: Just as movies began as novelties shown before “real” entertainment, or as nickel entertainments in amusement arcades, well, that describes the early days of gaming as well. Movies went from Train Arriving at a Station to The Great Train Robbery in twelve…
Wired just loves technology. Here’s an article about a technological solution to forgetting. As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them. We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular — or supremely practical —…
Reuters: To launch next year as a massively multiplayer online game, or MMOG to those in the gaming community, Lego Universe will let players create online versions of themselves and interact with each other. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.
AP: Nearly a third of children ages 6 to 10 are regular users of digital audio players, according to market research firm the NPD Group. And thanks to entrepreneurs like Katz, they can now use them to listen to bedtime stories. In March, the Audible.com founder launched AudibleKids.com, where children can download books directly onto…
Naomi Alderman (Guardian): [S]ometimes I admire the beautifully-rendered star-filled sky, and sometimes I drive the in-game car into a lamp-post, just to see what happens. It is play, just like “cops and robbers”, just like daydreaming, just like writing a novel. I’m not a big fan of driving games, and the longest stretches of game-playing…
Wired: The U.S. Army Intelligence Center is using a custom game to train interrogators, or “human collectors,” as they are euphemistically known. Known by the staggering title of Intelligence and Electronic Warfare Tactical Proficiency Trainer Human Intelligence Control Cell, the simulation was designed by General Dynamics from the shooter Far Cry. The Army game features…
Inside Higher Ed: “Information on computer science subjects in Wikipedia is likely to be accurate and informative, often using unique resources to illustrate concepts that are not available to print media,” wrote de Medeiros in an e-mail. “This probably derives from the fact that computer scientists use the computer as their main form of access…
Nerdvana: ROFLCon (From Leeeeroy Jeninks to Bert is Evil to LOLTrek to Tron guy, old friends come back from the abyss; good thing too, because I’ve got more than 15 minutes of love for our favorite memes of yesteryear. Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump…
Pew / Internet (PDF): Most teenagers spend a considerable amount of their life composing texts, but they do not think that a lot of the material they create electronically is real writing. The act of exchanging emails, instant messages, texts, and social network posts is communication that carries the same weight to teens as phone…
Geeky awesomeness from the Steampunk Workshop.
Back when the box art had little to do with the way computer games looked, you got used to the cognitive disconnect between the two media. My brain still hasn’t fully processed Infocom Diskgate, when I come across a trove of Atari 2600 cartridges that resemble games I played, but the boxes seem… different. Here’s…
Imagine that, since childhood, you’ve been a fan of a now-obscure genre of computer games called interactive fiction. Imagine that, since 1999, you’ve kept a weblog. Imagine that, since 2003, you’ve taught journalism and new media courses, in which you have introduced students to weblogs and interactive fiction (among other topics, of course). Recently, after…
Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry. The problem with a “what do you think about this”, or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until…
Andy Baio offers some forensic digital journalism: From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of…
An article about an entrepreneur who stretches the definition of “book” (International Herald Tribune): Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it. Among…
My former student Mike Rubino makes a good point about the encrustation of social networking icons that are clogging up the interfaces of content-rich websites. Now, instead of a website having the normal “E-mail this article”; “Print this article”; and the occasional “Digg this article” link, it’s got a slew of other services. You have…
The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online. The term “sex” (which appears in the title paired with “violence”) seems to mean “gender” in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven’t heard from…
Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous. Lindsay’s father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other…
The Smoking Gun has this snarky story… I’ve changed the inline links so that they point to The Smoking Gun, rather than to the photos the article mentions about): A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant’s popular “Street View” mapping feature has made a photo of their…