“But I’m going to be a video game designer!” protests one of my Grade 10 English students. “I don’t need to be able to read novels or write essays.” The way the game is rigged right now, in order to gain admission to a reputable video game design program in a traditional post-secondary institution, one…
Before class, Watch this 10-minute introduction to Modern Interactive Fiction. Watch this 2-minute trailer for a documentary film on interactive fiction. (Optional: a version of the film is available online: GET LAMP… I’m featured at the 12:30, 17 minutes, and around 41 minutes. You may appreciate the snark I offer at 49 minutes.) In order to understand what…
I’m about to introduce interactive fiction in my “New Media Projects” course. I’m glad to find further evidence that the genre continues to be discovered and shared. If you start playing IF and search for people with the same interests to chat with, good resources, and help of any kind, the intfiction forum is the…
A few days ago, I blogged about visiting SportsWorks at the Carnegie Science Center. A couple weeks ago, I brought my son and his friend to see an extended tour of the submarine USS Requin. This post is mostly about visiting the Exploration Station, part of the fourth floor installation that features more of the hands-on,…
I confess that I have never been all that physical. I do try to take the stairs instead of the elevator at work. I let my daughter talk me into auditioning for a community theater musical (and while my dancing was definitely in the bottom third, or maybe the bottom tenth, I didn’t humiliate myself).…
I was at a youth car wash today, watching my son and the other the kids spray each other (and sometimes the cars). One of the customers happened to be carrying an anthology of dystopian science fiction. We got to chatting, and he told me about this parlor game — which sadly seems to be…
If brass lanterns or slathering-fanged grues mean anything to you, you might want to look into Inklewriter. I teach a text-adventure (“interactive fiction“) unit in my “New Media Projects” course. My mainstay for that unit is Inform 7, a robust tool with loads of examples and a user community that I know well (through my…
It’s just this feeling I have when I view the last several dozen images saved to my photostream. Similar:We Tried to Do Vanlife Right. It Broke Us Down.Shortly before I got married, my sister …CultureTechnical and Literary Writing: What’s the difference? « DekonztruktschonIn an advanced new media class, I’m intr…AcademiaI Cannot Begin to Tell You…
It’s a stretch to say Atari has turned 40, since there isn’t much left but the name, but this is still an interesting read. Companies began collapsing and Atari was soon sold to a man named Jack Tramiel. Over the next decade, Atari made computers, a game console called Jaguar and a handheld game machine…
Writing, however, was a part of the game industry in the beginning. It’s most faithful legacy is now considered niche. Great game writers like Steve Meretzky and Tim Schafer are as memorable as writers in comparable genres; Robert Heinlein, Dashiell Hammett, H. P. Lovecraft. Today, you have to dig deep into the circles of game…
This paper discusses the materializations of story world entities that are distributed with game packaging, here referred to as feelies, as props that support narrative elements in story-driven digital games. The narrative support is suggested to function on global and local levels, where the first one refers to the immersive effects concerning the story world,…
A student project explores a niche of the games market, for a class taught by Infocom legend Brian Moriarty. The video game industry has expanded rapidly in recent years, growing from a 9.5 billion dollar industry in 2007 to a 25.1 billion dollar industry in 2010. This growth is due to the common interest that…
A powerful essay, for the next time I teach Videogame Culture and Theory. (Some salty language ahead.) So the Hitman Absolution trailer. Do I have a problem with the existence of female assassins? No. Do I have a problem with female assassins dressing up as nuns? No. Do I have a problem with Agent 47 killing females…
Almost all the promise once held by virtual worlds has since been realized by Facebook. For every social interaction, brand engagement or persistent multiplayer social experience that Second Life or World of Warcraft or MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side was supposed to provide, there’s something the same or very similar available on Facebook — probably…
“Overall, it was just boring. Really boring! Really boring!” —The Washington Post. Similar:Woman Yelling at Cat About Academic Argument: an evidence-based defense of a non-obvious p…See: Academic Argument: Evidence-based D…Academia"It's called an amphora," the artist says.AestheticsFirstborn (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 21) Worf prepares his reluctant son f… Rewatching ST:TNG Worf awkwardly rehe…Culturewhen someone…
A middle school teacher in South Carolina has been accused of dragging a student under a table during class, telling the boy “this is what the Nazis do to Jews,” police said Monday. The 12-year-old student said he got up to sharpen a pencil at Bluffton Middle School on Wednesday when Patricia Mulholland grabbed him…
In the early 1970s William Crowther worked for the high-tech R&D company BBN Technologies as part of a team developing the ARPAnet; a computer network predecessor to the Internet. Crowther has never shown any desire to court celebrity for his achievements. Aside from a couple of interviews from books, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Genesis II: Creation and…
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us…
It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films. Designers of text-based…
Hap Aziz, who’s running a Kickstarter campaign to fund an interactive fiction exploration of colonial Williamsburg, was interviewed by Emily Short. One of the fascinating things to me about the events surrounding American independence is that there was so much disagreement and debate regarding whether or not the colonies should dissolve their bonds with England.…