See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Karissa sent me this story from Macworld: Eight consumer and public-interest groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, saying mobile phone providers should not be able to block text messages from political groups and advertisers. […] If the FCC grants the petition, it would open up mobile phone networks to millions of…
Doris Lessing doesn’t like those silly bloggers one bit, as interpreted here via commentary from Ars Technica: Computers and the Internet and the television have wrought a revolution on ways of thinking and spending leisure time, and Lessing doesn’t believe that society as a whole has really thought through the implications of these changes. “And…
Adam Parrish: The Frotzophone is an interface for making music with interactive fiction. The topography simulated in the game is used to generate sound, as is the player’s path through the game. A Frotzophone “performance” looks just like playing a text adventure; but in addition to playing a game, you’re also playing music. Here’s a…
ZDNet explores the public reaction to Amazon’s new e-book reader. I don’t usually judge things by how they look but this thing, in my opinion, is ugly in a way that I thought was exclusive to the Zune. Weighing up the pros and cons, I’d come to the conclusion that the Kindle has already hit…
From a speculative essay by Richard M. Stallman: In his software class, Dan had learned that each book had a copyright monitor that reported when and where it was read, and by whom, to Central Licensing. (They used this information to catch reading pirates, but also to sell personal interest profiles to retailers.) The next…
Heh. Lightweight. That’s funny. Via Information Week. Zuckerberg said that when Facebook considered Beacon it hoped to let people share information across sites with their friends. He said it had to be clear and easy to control, while also being “lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the Web.”
Information Week: One of the most prestigious U.K. universities has begun to scan the social networking sites seeking snapshots and other evidence of misbehavior that qualifies for formal disciplinary action. Students at Oxford University are outraged that school leaders are scanning Facebook and disciplining students based on what they find there.
Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users: While users’ activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users’…
Via CNN. Here’s a heartbreaking detail I hadn’t noticed in previous coverage. When Megan’s mother returned home, she found her daughter crying at the computer. After reading the messages, she criticized her daughter for using inappropriate language, Banas said. Telling her mom that “I can’t believe you’re not on my side,” Megan ran upstairs and…
The NY Times reports that Six Apart is selling LiveJournal. The owner of LiveJournal, a blogging and social-networking site, agreed yesterday to sell the company to SUP, a Russian online media company, in the latest example of deal-making in the social-networking sector.
Inside Higher Ed offers short stories on two student papers that are struggling to keep their administrations at bay: At Oklahoma State University, the editors of the Daily O’Collegian, the more than 80-year-old campus newspaper, have for several weeks refused to let the articles they write for the print publication appear on ocolly.com, the newspaper’s…
While my daughter was (supposed to be) napping this afternoon, I downloaded Crystal Space, an open-source tool for creating 3D games. I made lightening-fast progress in the first couple of hours, but after that I was quickly lost. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic. Over the last year or so, I have experimented with Half-Life 2…
Jeremy Douglass has published a Creative Commons dissertation on interactive fiction. I recently brought a printout into my “Writing about Literature” class in order to help my undergrads (English majors, some of whom want to be professional writers or literature professors) see their homework assignments as points on a scale that includes books and beyond.…
Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Pennsylvania’s Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own “Just Say No to Wikipedia” signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia’s…
Gamers with Jobs reviews Amazon’s Kindle. Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It’s surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it…
This story brings Facebook shaming to another level. It tells the story of an intern at a bank who emails his bosses about needing to take a day off work in October to take care of some family business in New York City. But his bosses discover a picture of him at a party in…
Uh, no, it doesn’t. Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida. The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people…
In Game Design Review, Krystian Majewski takes a common creative writing mantra and rips it a new one in a way that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for some time. It seems counter-intuitive but actually, LESS emphasis on some parts of the story create MORE emotional response. This is something…
On Gamasutra, John Hopson says academics should not bother trying to get game designers to listen to any research that doesn’t translate into more money for game companies. When a researcher presents a product team with a set of research findings and recommendations, they are asking the team to invest time and money implementing their…