See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Terry Harpold (Game Studies 7.1) uses Zork as one example in this article. Common threshold structures of the world – closed doors or windows, elevators, magical portals – often fulfil this dual function. Segmenting spaces of the world in a way that is easily accepted by the player, they may also mask computational latencies (the…
Excellent three-part post from Lisa Spiro. People, this is the kind of thing Vannevar Bush imagined scholars would do when he dreamed up the Memex — saving each other time by sharing annotated lists. This blog has landed on my RSS list. Part 1 and Part 2 are up; I’ll add the link to Part…
A student in my Video Game Culture and Theory course, when writing a reaction to playing Andrew Plotkin’s Shade, referred to a casual gaming genre that was new to me, the point-and-click “escape the room” game. The Wikipeidia entry for Escape the Room mentioned a key-retrieval puzzle from Zork, but I thought that passage had…
In Reason, David Harsanyi reviews The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen. “Can a social worker in Des Moines really be considered credible in arguing with a trained physicist over string theory?” he asks, referring to Wikipedia, the online, user created encyclopedia. “Can a car mechanic have…
1up: Ten years ago, Westwood released its point-and-click adventure game adaptation of Blade Runner. Blade Runner was, if nothing else, a towering achievement in terms of evoking the original film’s memorable aesthetic. The game’s mo-cap sprites moved against dim, smoky noir backdrops; every exterior shot felt exhilaratingly accurate, while interior locations were ominous and claustrophobic.…
Video games didn’t start with Pac-Man (1980), Space Invaders (1978), or Pong (1972).
Great 1972 Rolling Stone article about a foundational computer game. Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business hours) in North America hundreds of computer technicians are effectively out of their bodies, locked in life-or-Death space combat computer-projected onto cathode ray tube display screens, for hours at a time, ruining their eyes, numbing their fingers in…
In 2002, David Winer bet Martin Nisenholtz that In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site. According to Workbench: So Winer wins the bet 3-2, but his premise of blog triumphalism is challenged by the…
I just got this e-mail. Scratch is an amazing tool designed to teach programming to kids. My nine-year-old loves it. I’m planning to use Scratch in my “New Media Projects” class next fall. Because of your interest in Scratch, we thought you would like to know about the Scratch@MIT conference that we are hosting next…
The special coding Wikipedia has developed for its user-edited pages is powerful. Some shortcuts are simple and elegeant — you just put [[square brackets]] around words to make them into links, and clicking on the link will automatically either take you to an existing page, or let you create a new one. But as Wikipedia…
Advice from GameCareerGuide.com resembles what I tell my English literature majors about why they are expected to study and benefit from literary works that they might not choose to read for their own pleasure. (The same goes for students in my Video Game Culture and Theory course.) Before you begin down this path there is…
Anna L. Mallory (Roanoke Times): The game, a takeoff on programs popular before the Internet and Nintendo, blends social-networking and choose-your-own adventure tools. It allows players to not only play games but also create and share their own adventures in user-submitted fictional lands. Mallory also includes some quotes from former Infocom Imp Steve Meretzky on…
For Jorn Barger, who coined the word “weblog” in December of 1997, outbound links are key to the formula that makes a weblog useful to readers: 2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.
Katie Haegele quotes Chris Joseph: “It seems most people these days equate literature with the novel, which is obviously a relatively recent form, and then judge all other literature by that standard, which is a terrible measure of digital literature,” Joseph said in an e-mail interview. “My feeling is that younger audiences already do accept…
I’m misquoted on your December press page. What I wrote was When students are writing about some areas of popular culture, user-authored sites such as Wikipedia and Urbandictionary, or game databases like MobyGames are actually far more useful than academic sources (which take months or even years to appear). http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink/banning-wikipedia-at-school-go/ But the quote appears as…
From the Google Blog, a preview of Google’s mashup of Wikipedia and About.com: The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names…
Why does this happen? For some reason, perhaps the oddity of ordering milk from an online bookseller, has attracted a large number of spoof reviews — Lovecraft, Coleridge, romances, haiku. Here’s a bit of Tuscan Whole Milk flash fiction: This milk was so good, I passed out. When I woke up 3 weeks later, apes…
movabletype.org As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. This is a good thing. MT had previously had a policy that you could make changes to the code but you couldn’t redistribute those changes. MT has…
News.com.au Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week. He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder. “They (Google Earth) have had a van in the area for the last week,”…
Yahoo | Reuters “w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.