It’s rather hard to believe it took them so long. DC Just Announced Plans For Choose Your Own Adventure Style Digital Comics. Similar:Voiceover artist Gayanne Potter urging ScotRail to remove her voice from new AI announceme…When I was working in radio news in the …CultureData-Related Deaths, 1960-2019 (Excluding Fatalities Caused by Misreadings, Typographical … DesignBrilliant,…
Chris Person posts a link to this very clear critique of news reporting that blames violent video games and movies for real-world violence. One Author Breaks Down the Reality of Violent Games in the Media. Similar:Author of 80s classic The Hobbit didn't know game was a hit The Hobbit stood out from the advent…CybercultureCursor*10 (nekogames)I don’t…
The New Mexico landfill or “Atari Dump” where the game console maker buried its mistakes — the biggest being the game E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial — will be dug up by game developer Fuel Industries, which hopes to make a documentary about the project. Also known as the “Atari Graveyard” or the “E.T. Dump”, the desert…
Below is a snippet from “Texty Cloak of Darkness,” which aims to use prose conventions to emulate game-state changes and alternate endings (in a medium designed to be linear). Since our encounter, such as it is, has already begun, it may as well happen in a place. The foyer of the opera house is where…
“Iffy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments. “Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion in five…
“Scratchy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the “Cloak of Darkness” specification — a very simple pattern, designed to help programmers compare the strengths and weaknesses of various coding environments. “Cloak of Darkness” is not going to win prizes for its prose, imagination or subtlety. Or scope: it can be played to a successful conclusion…
My Ouya arrived — a Kickstarter-funded gaming console. I have never been a console gamer. Lately, I haven’t even been a PC gamer — when I have the time I would much rather create in Blender 3D or, in the past year or so, make a video. But the principle behind the Ouya — that…
I just noticed that a few days ago, a Wikipedia user uploaded a photo to the bio for computing history legend Will Crowther. The caption reads “Will Crowther in fall of 2012 in the Shawangunk Mountains.” A bit of Google-fu leads to several photos showing Crowther is still climbing (the hobby he had long before…
I’m on a committee that is exploring a multimodal a revision to my school’s freshman writing program. So far I have never seriously tried introducing new media content into a freshman writing course, but this may do the trick. After two semesters of teaching students to read, play, and write IF games, I can say…
As I make progress in designing the class text adventure, I’ll post about my process and challenges. Right now, I’m foreseeing the following challenges: how to let students know how far to read/play at any given time (this will be a hybrid class, so there will be less in-class f2f support and motivation) students may…
Game development culture often involves 18-hour work days during crunch times that last for months. I remember as a teen or college student enjoying a “lost weekend” of doing nothing but playing the latest game (the X-Wing games, The Dig, and Full Throttle come to mind), but expecting the professionals who produce games to work…
Interesting discussion of a political hoopla surrounding a Canadian provincial TV station’s support of a video game on laying an oil pipeline. In a previous job, I was evaluated by people who asked me to submit printouts of my online work; my printouts were then evaluated according to criteria that were developed for print work.…
Gaming ledends Dave Lebling and Mark Blank honored for their pioneering work in text-adventure games, at Infocom. (Clips from Jason Scott’s GET LAMP documentary follow Dave Lebling’s introduction, around 1:35 or so. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3bXiR22AEU Welcome to the Official D.I.C.E. Summit Website. Similar:I try to create one brand new element, modify one existing element, and reuse existing…
Playing games which require children to follow fast-moving events, track moving objects and pay attention to all areas of the screen teaches them to draw meaning from written words, researchers explained. Dr Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua in Italy, who led the study, said: “Action video games enhance many aspects of visual attention,…
I’d like this article better if it weren’t divided up into four ad-generating chunks, but here’s the payoff: It’s not all about colossal caves and twisty little passages any more. Here are a few IF highlights that show off how varied the genre can be, from card-based trips to the ‘Neath to hunts for lost…
While competing in the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest Saturday, contestant Gerald Green reportedly incorporated characters, dialogue, and set design from 16th-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus into his elaborately choreographed dunk routine. “Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee/Faustus hath cut his arm, and with his…
Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here). I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of…
Not much has changed for educational game developers, either. Targeting schools as potential buyers is still less profitable than targeting home schoolers, parents, and grandparents. There really isn’t a lot of funding in school budgets for games and even if there were, figuring out the differing sales processes is time-consuming. Larger school districts may even…
Pretty awesome, focused use of Inform 7. (I’m generally content just to let my students explore, trusting through experience that they will learn from testing each other’s games and asking me specific questions realated to the stories they are creating, such as, “So how do I make it so you can’t enter the TARDIS without…
I’ll blog pretty much anything that has to do with Inform 7. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A…