I’ve been waiting quite a while to be able to blog this campus newspaper story about Jason Scott’s visit to Seton Hill. Unlike today’s traditional videogames, which are jam-packed with high-resolution graphics, text adventure games force players to utilize their imaginations. Also known as interactive fiction, these were the precursors for some of the most…
Posted to Kickstarter at midnight. Not quite 8 hours later, Andrew Plotkin was already halfway there. His pitch has great production values, which I’m sure is part of what has inspired so much confidence. Similar:DC Just Announced Plans For Choose Your Own Adventure Style Digital ComicsIt’s rather hard to believe it took them…GamesInterior Detail of…
Documentary filmmaker Jason Scott will present GET LAMP, a documentary on word-driven computer games, at Seton Hill University, 7-10pm Tuesday (Oct 5). Scott is a digital entrepreneur with a Twitter account devoted to his cat Sockington (with nearly 1.5 million followers). He regularly gives convention speeches on such topics as Wikipedia and digital archiving. GET…
I just wrote these examples on a student paper, in an attempt to reinforce a lesson in showing vs. telling. 1) Winning is important to me. It doesn’t matter to me what I do, so long as I win. (That’s TELLING. Its dry and boring, and not at all convincing.) 2) On the shelf in…
What if we blurred the lines between academic subjects and reimagined the typical American classroom so that, at least in theory, it came to resemble a typical American living room or a child’s bedroom or even a child’s pocket, circa 2010 — if, in other words, the slipstream of broadband and always-on technology that fuels…
I trimmed out some stale examples and added these examples to my handout on showing and telling. What if your goal were to write about your favorite sport. Telling (No Details) I like many different sports, from skiing to rock-climbing, but when it comes right down to it, I would have to say that ping-pong is my favorite…
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If you could recommend a game as a community-building activity for your school, what would you recommend? I thought about some of the arty Jason Rohrer games, but maybe those would be more appropriate for a “How can games lead to deep thoughts” pre-discussion, something I might use to get buy-in from the non-gaming community…
The mind boggles… Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig’s disease. —NY Times Similar:I Made a Cheerful Maze Game in Scratch Well, it’s cheerful unle…CybercultureMy son teaching chess to a young pupilCultureMan Infected with Ebola Misinformation Through Casual Contact With Cable NewsOn the other end of the link, the New Yo…Amusing2020, In One Photo.…
Doom was a ground-breaking 2003 1993 first-person shooter, with a successful business model that involved releasing the first few levels as shareware and charging for the full game. From GoldenEye to Modern Warfare 2, I’ve played first-person shooters made of polygons. As the years advanced, I’ve watched the worlds and figures these games depict advance…
A skillful exercise, this sonnet blog. Such parser game nostalgia warms my heart. You might be int’rested in Graham Nelson’s Command-line Shakespeare remix, The Tempest. Similar:Fie upon your multi-page, ad-stuffed crapfest of shame. (Don't click!)What I wrote is not actually a list, jus…DesignAdvent of Digital Humanities Will Make English Departments Pointless — New RepublicDon’t overreact…
There was no leaflet in my mailbox this morning, but I did find something much better — a copy of Jason Scott’s text adventure game documentary.My commemorative coin… Similar:19 Book Cover ClichésThis one is #3, “Man Lurking by Fence.” …AestheticsVincent Connare, Inventor Of 'The Most Hated Font,' Defends HimselfA typographic engineer, Connare was work…AestheticsFact check:…
Now available for Windows-based PCs, Classic Adventures: The Great Gatsby is a downloadable casual game that lets you interact with familiar characters, locations and story lines from the legendary American novel. As Nick Carraway, a young idealist back from the Great War, you must unravel secrets buried behind the decadence of the Roaring ’20s. This…
Gameplay in Cow Clicker is insultingly simple — Bogost has described it as “Facebook games distilled to their essence.” Users obtain a cow on which they can click every six hours, and every time they click, they earn more opportunities to click their cow or their friends’ cows. Users can buy custom “premium” cows or…
(A transcription of the text and scans of photos from a 1972 magazine article about the legendary space combat computer game. Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone.) October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console…
Director Peter Berg is expected to soon begin shooting the live-action tentpole based on Hasbro’s naval combat board game. —Variety Boggle. Trouble. Sorry. Similar:A stranger took this photo of my parents doing their daily crossword together in a cafe.A stranger took this photo of my parents…CultureI worked in a video store for 25 years. Here’s…
The Blender Foundation has announced its release of version 2.53 beta. Blender is a free, open-source 3D animation and game design package. I’ve taught it in the past in my New Media Projects course, but no student has ever chosen a Blender creation for a term project, and some of my textually-minded English majors have…
No, the awesome mascot-based space platformer you cheerily sketched on graph paper when you were supposed to be focused on math homework is not going straight to production. No, in fact, there are not a million page views at the ready for your exhaustive essay on the themes of Silent Hill 2. You will probably…
There is a documentary film on text adventures here. Paths lead off in all directions.>get GET LAMP Similar:It Costs So Much to Run ChatGPT That OpenAI Is Losing Money on $200 ChatGPT Pro Subscripti…I’m also thinking of the cost to the stu…AcademiaHong Kong: journalist permanently blinded in one eye amid increased police violence A rubber…
Creating interactive fiction (a genre also know as “text adventures”) means writing computer code that represents objects and behaviors, while also creating interesting characters, a compelling plot, and maybe a few narrative surprises, all of which can be assembled for a reader to experience in multiple different ways. The resources that follow are intended to…