“It’s 2012 and our emergency alert system still sounds like a Speak and Spell and looks like an Atari 2600,” wrote one among a range of instant reactions broadcast on Twitter. The tweet was apparently a response to the 1960s-style black and white lettering of the television message. — Did the national Emergency Alert System mistakenly…
My 13yo son plays through chapter 2 of my 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition entry, Fine Tuned. Similar:Subtle Stylesheet Tweaks for Mobile SiteOn the mobile version of my WordPress we…AestheticsYesterday it was 298 so this is actually a good number.PersonalWhat It Means If You're A 'Paragraph Texter'A very fluffy article that does a good j…CultureAnother delightful…
A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one. NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related…
Caves and sandboxes are some kinds of game spaces I’ve explored in conversations (and an unpublished manuscript) with David Thomas, so I was very interested in these musings from Not Your Mama’s Gamer. In a landscape polluted by smog and litter, box stores, fast food chains, more subdivisions and ever more streets–it becomes harder and…
Great story capturing the quirky, lonely brilliance of a man who raptured all the pixellated cows right out of their cute little pastures. This is the story of a person whose joke project became more successful than the one on which he lavished love and intellect, the climate that caused that to happen and how…
Thanks to my colleague, Josh Sasmor. The badly-indented long quotation is close enough now that the stink of its hot, fetid breath hits you like a wave. >hint You’re a postgraduate student. >make lasso out of tough fibres of pure cynicism You quickly knot a lasso together. >lasso quotation The badly-indented long quotation grunts as…
From a recent IFDB review by Peter Pears: Who else who write such a good game, with such engaging characters, such pleasant puzzles, such lovely writing, and then proceed to first release it in a buggy and incomplete fashion? Even today it’s not complete, though vastly superior to its first release – the last sections…
An online game has helped determine the structure of an enzyme that could pave the way for anti-AIDS drugs. The game, called Foldit, allows players to create new shapes of proteins by randomly folding digital molecules on their computer screens. In the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, scientists write that they have been puzzled…
In its sometimes-turbulent thirty-year history, the graphic-adventure genre has driven technology adoption, ridden at both the crest and trough of the graphics and audio waves, touched the lives of millions of people, and shaped the rise (and, in some cases, fall) of several big-name people and companies in the gaming industry. It’s a genre that…
Just after training camp closed last year, Offensive Coordinator Cam Cameron wondered if the Ravens could put their several-hundred page playbook on some sort of tablet reader. A few weeks later, Head Coach John Harbaugh asked the same question. Now, after almost a year of development, the Ravens’ playbook is completely on a set of…
Instead of dispensing a card like Zoltar, the Gypsy would actually speak your fortune from a hidden record player. When you dropped a nickel in the slot, her eyes would flash, her teeth would chatter and her voice would come floating from a tube extending out of the eight-foot-tall box. Word got out when the…
Daniel Donahoo: Gamification in Education: Should We Play?. Similar:AmLit Rescue — Scratch GameA student in my “American Literature: 19…AcademiaDaughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage's production of The Outsiders (Mar 6-15)My daughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prim…BooksPolice, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probeIn addition to being almost universally …Current_EventsSuddenly Human (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch,…
This rhetorical power derives from the “-ification” rather than from the “game”. -ification involves simple, repeatable, proven techniques or devices: you can purify, beautify, falsify, terrify, and so forth. -ification is always easy and repeatable, and it’s usually bullshit. Just add points. Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets…
Which is cooler? That my 13yo son was just sitting at the kitchen table singing lyrics to MC Frontalot’s “It Is Pitch Dark,” or that my 9yo daughter was chiming in with corrections? It Is Pitch Dark Similar:My parents doing their daily crossword puzzle.PersonalI went down fighting.PersonalHippocratic Oath #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 4)…
Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a “machine-learning system so it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy.” They didn’t teach the PC how to play Civ, but they taught them how to read about it. The system had no pre-programmed notion of turn-based…
Yay, me. I got the MouseLook script to work in my Blender Game Engine work-in-progress. Thanks to [2.5] FPS MouseLook Script. Based on models I had already created for one reason or another, the game currently involves donuts, paneled walls, tables, and iPad projectiles. Oh, and you’re a little bot. You may have guessed that I’m not…
While 1979 wasn’t yet the year that adventure games broke really big, it was the year that Adams laid the groundwork for their doing so, for the changing of the calendar left him poised with a new company, a portable adventure-game engine, and a nice catalog of already extant games in a wide variety of…
Angry Birds Text Adventure of the Day – TDW Geeks. Thanks for the link, Josh. Similar:You're Doing It for the Exposure!! The Oatmeal on working for “exposure…BusinessIPads in the classroom: The right way to use them, demonstrated by a Swiss school.The devices are not really valued as por…CybercultureMeet the 12-year-old boy who makes games instead…
Since its release, Call of Duty has stood as the exemplar of historical reality as a backdrop to a video game, with each of its following releases living up to this standard. Gamers are given the choice of playing through a number of different campaigns based on country, with each tailored to reflect the worldview,…
…the whole resembles a lightly frothed kafka tale digitised as a text-adventure game thus anticipating later experiments in “interactive fiction” while also functioning as a satire for the author’s day and oh yes our own on the subtly crushing effects of corporate life which was always after all the genius of perec to marry a…