See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
A good analysis from Cory Doctorow: Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there’s…
The opening of this story uses the sudden deaths of two bloggers over a three-month span (and the non-fatal heart attack of a third) in order to suggest that bloggers are blogging themselves into their graves. How many reporters, kindergarten teachers, retirees, people named “Joe” and left-handed people died in the last three months?  OMG…
Information Week: The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong “Au Clair De La Lune” on April 9, 1860. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a “phonautograph” to scratch…
Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn. According to Slashdot, Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn’t think something…
The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news: Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of…
New to me… disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum. In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either “G*d”…
I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I’m still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate. The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal…
Play This Thing offers this review of “Photopia” (a text game by Adam Cadre). Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It’s barely interactive at all. And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It’s difficult to explain why that is without…
The Times Online has a story about children’s non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age…
I can’t wait to see more of Get Lamp.
So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice: So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and…
Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new report: Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day’s newspaper, Rosenstield said. “The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online,” he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to…
I thought maybe two or three students would “friend” me out of pity, but I was rather surprised that within about 24 hours I had 35 confirmed “friends” — several of those within the first few minutes of registering for the service. Only half of those contacts are from Seton Hill — the rest are…
Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response. Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue “wing” on the left, and the…
The Independent has a good tribute to Gary Gygax. If D&D is a nerd’s pastime, then there are a lot of nerds around. Guesstimate calculations – it’s impossible to reach a precise total – suggest that Dungeons & Dragons has about 25 million regular players worldwide. Certainly Gygax made more than $1bn in sales since…
Gravitation: an autobiographical video game. I’m sick right now, or I’d give a better description. Not quite as emotional for me as the same designer’s Passage, but another short game that illustrates the possibility of packing games with an emotional argument.
Toronto Star: Avenir said he joined the Facebook group last fall to get help with some of the questions the professor would give students to do online. As the network grew, he took over as its administrator, which is why he believes he alone has been charged. “So we each would be given chemistry questions…
>> Hello.How do you do. Please state your problem.>> I’m sad that another hero of geekdom has passed away.I am sorry to hear that you are sad.>> You knew him, Eliza.We were discussing you — not me.>> Ah, but you wouldn’t be here if it werent for Joseph Weizenbaum.Do you think its likely that it…
Stephanie Rosenbloom, NYT: Research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of “The X Files.” On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls. “Most guys don’t have patience for this kind of thing,” said Nicole Dominguez, 13,…
Grand Text Auto introduced me to the excellent indie mini-game Passage. Play it. It takes a few minutes to download and about 5 minutes to play. I’m misty-eyed. Play it!