Wish I had come across this a little earlier in the term… too late it to add it to my “Media and Culture” new media seminar. Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take…
Walden, A Game simulates both personal and environmental life, modeling the basic personal needs outlined by Thoreau, as well as some of the more experiential concepts he described. Furthermore, the game takes advantage of the detailed notes that Thoreau took about the pond, and its surrounding landscape, flora and fauna. —Walden, A Game – USC…
Sigh. Critical Path – Dan Amrich – Google Books. Similar:‘Aims’: the software for hire that can control 30,000 fake online profiles At first glance, the Twitter user “Can…BusinessFirst page of a student’s Texture project. (This made me laugh.) This clever freshman writing student…AcademiaEdible Chess Chess pastry cutters handmade in bra…AestheticsNYT newsroom integration memoBy integrating the…
The sum total of good things in the universe has increased. The metal on the top of some of the gear is rusty and weathered. But Diaz knows what he’s doing; the man can field strip an Apple II floppy drive and refurbish the thing in under an hour. Some of his equipment may not…
There was only one game. Appropriately for us neighborhood-explorers, for us mapmakers, it was launched by typing ADVENTURE. The game began you at a house by the woods, with a mailbox, a trail to a grate, not unlike the wandering explorations we undertook on our own in our simple neighborhood. It explicated all of this…
If you were to draw a Venn diagram including fans of They Might Be Giants and those of interactive fiction (“text adventures” to the layperson), chances are there would be some significant overlap. From that overlap springs Apollo 18+20: The IF Tribute Album, which is in fact not an album, but a collection of interactive fiction commemorating…
Space seems like a fitting locale for the casual gaming franchise Angry Birds, considering its meteoric rise in popularity since launching 2009. —Review: Angry Birds Space out of this world. Excuse me, but do meteors actually rise? Similar:NBC's Chuck Todd takes aim at CNN”The big danger always confronting CNN —…BusinessPeople with autism spectrum disorder avoid…
Since its November release, Skyrim has won award after award and led reviewers to call it the “greatest role-playing video game ever made.” In its first month, it made $650 million, almost double the entire year’s gross in the United States for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” the bestselling movie of 2011.…
Presented by Jason Scott, adjunct archivist at Internet Archive, Kari Kraus, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, and Nick Hasty, director of technology at Rhizome. The “Preserving the Creative Culture of the Web” panel at SXSW addressed an interesting question: “Should web sites and artifacts be treated like works of art or architecture?” Our…
Replacement parts are hard to come by for a 17-year-old robot, so science center staff long have known that Hoops is one major breakdown away from forced retirement. That would leave a void not only for a generation of visitors who have marveled at the lanky mechanical athlete, but also for staff who have grown…
Atari’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge seeks to get all entrants to give away game ideas to Atari that Atari can then exploit, and the entrant relinquishes all further interest in the idea. Atari then selects 20 “semi-finalists” to put months of work into building out their ideas into playable versions that Atari has full ownership…
Useless code and comments in code—these are the zombie figures of software. They serve no purpose in a program’s execution, but they exude what Mark Marino calls extra-functional significance. They have meaning beyond the program. They speak not to the machine or the compiler, but to a different audience, another reader. In software development, that…
The most detail I’ve ever seen about Will Crowther’s other creative projects; here, in a conversation dated 1996, he discusses “different ‘adventures’”, and reveals that he wrestled with many of the same challenges that interactive fiction programmers faced through the 1980s and on to the present. I have at various times made different “adventures.” Two…
LittleTextPeople, founded by writer Emily Short and Maxis veteran Richard Evans, has so far focused on the development of software that replicates complex social interaction. For instance, among its internal technology is a simulator that models social behavior and individual personalities. —Gamasutra – News – Second Life developer acquires experimental game studio LittleTextPeople. Similar:Facebook Has…
Via David Thompson Similar:The Search for IT Relevence — Featuring Seton Hill IT Guru Phil Komarnyhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGh6MasSU…AcademiaHow do you spend your last week of summer break?AcademiaReal college classes have writing assignments and required reading.While I can imagine teaching a course th…AcademiaConfronting the Myth of the 'Digital Native'It’s one thing to be able use a service …AcademiaI…
Interesting application of math to sports. In analyzing teams’ shot quality, shot rates and shot percentages, Skinner found that the average NBA squad has a 4 percent probability of shooting the ball when left with 15 seconds on the shot clock in their final possession. The ideal rate is 12 percent. Skinner didn’t offer guidelines…
We finished the game over the weekend. Delightful. via My daughter likes Machinarium. – YouTube. Similar:Post-publication review as an efficient alternative to pre-publication peer reviewAndrew Gelman of “Statistical Modeling, …AcademiaChildren struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors sayWhen I was in middle school, I developed…Culture"Shakespeare in Love" with the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra…
I may seem laughably sentimental about what’s essentially pixels jiggering about. But somewhere deep inside when I was little I wanted to be an artist. And a whole art form has developed in my lifetime. I remember for the first time reading: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own…
I may seem laughably sentimental about what’s essentially pixels jiggering about. But somewhere deep inside when I was little I wanted to be an artist. And a whole art form has developed in my lifetime. I remember for the first time reading: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own…
I’ve been showing some of my Blender 3D creations to members of my son’s FIRST Robotics Competition team, and several of them asked me to teach them how to make a game. Blender 3D is a fantastic (free! open source!) tool that can model 3D computer-generated scenes and characters, render high-quality videos, as well as…