Games tend to evolve enormously over the standard two-year process, with whole missions often culled at a late stage, as playtesting reveals unforeseen fault lines and design issues. Having to recall actors and record chunks of new dialogue to reflect story changes is perceived as an expensive, time-consuming chore – the last thing a hassled…
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I am so looking forward to Jason Scott’s Get Lamp. (Family obligations are keeping me from attending the premiere at PAX East.) Talking to Scott, his passion for the subject and for detail are both formidable. Most of our interview was tangents, and I didn’t mind any of them. Discussing Colossal Cave Adventure, he ran…
I’ve never played this game, but in the last week or so, my attempts to play multiplayer games with my kids (Uru and Dungeons and Dragons Online) have been thwarted by the fact that my modem blips out for a few minutes every couple hours, which freezes up games that exchange information over the internet. …
Matt Takacs (a Seton Hill freshman who has been in two of my classes) offers this excellent overview of the ongoing Valve online scavenger hunt: It started innocently enough. Valve Software releases a small update for the three-year-old game Portal, which was included in the Orange Box. Upon looking at the update news, however, things…
A fan-produced Kings Quest sequel is shut down. What a way to treat your brand’s most loyal followers. Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not…
As part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group inquiry (membership-only link, but a publication is planned) into the original source code for Crowther’s Colossal Cave Adventure, I asked… When does Crowther use exclamation marks? It’s not a deep philosophical question, and the fate of the world does not hang on the outcome. But it’s…
Thanks for this find, Mark Sample (via Twitter). The ABCs of Adventuringby Admiral Jota, Dylan O’Donnell, G. Kevin Wilson, and Dan Shiovitz.A is for Adventure, the first of them all;B is for Brass lantern, so you don’t take a fall.C is for Compass, an unseen one you keepD is for Drinking, eating and sleep.E is…
This week, I’ll be facilitating a week-long collaborative annotation project, as part of the Critical Code Studies Working Group online conference, on the source code to Crowther’s original Colossal Cave Adventure (a classic text-only computer game from the 1970s). According to Donald Knuth, designer of the “literate programming paradigm,” Colossal Cave Adventure is the “ur-game…
Walter Frederick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died at the age of 90. —Guardian Similar:New Graphic for MLA Style Paper HandoutThe other day, I noticed that if you Goo…AcademiaTesting out my new greenscreenFriendly advice… If you are practicing…AestheticsHow are you holding up? What difficult choices have you made? How can we…
Zach Whalen is turning his dissertation into a blog-web-thing, in the hopes of developing a book-thing. In whatever form it takes, it’s an interesting approach to a textual study of video games. This study asks how the design and configuration of text in videogames contributes to their textuality. I argue that videogames are texts in…
I wish I’d seen this a few weeks ago, before my Video Game Culture and Theory class ended, but it’s still a welcome find. Similar:Academics work to detect ChatGPT and other AI writingToday I met a class of English majors wh…AcademiaLegos and M&M’s Bulge IllusionThese are straight vertical and horizont…AestheticsToilet paper isn't selling out because…
Amazon.com unexpectedly announced the Kindle Development Kit Thursday morning, which will allow developers to develop “active content” for the Kindle platform, to take advantage of the e-reader’s electronic ink display, Whispernet 3G technology, and days-long battery life.–PC Mag Somebody, please create a Z-code interpreter. I want my Kindle to guide me through a maze of…
One of the great parts about this job is stumbling upon nuggets of discussion not often talked about on other gaming sites. One such cornucopia of information is the various colleges that teach classes on videogames and the blogs posted by students and professors in reference to those classes. I’ve pointed out a few in the…
What are the capabilities of MIT’s Scratch, a kid-friendly programming tool? In about 30 minutes, I create a working ball-and-paddle game. The last two videos show some further tweaking for another 15 minutes. I presented these videos to my students in the context of a unit on games and education. HTML5 HTML5 480p FLV360p FLV360p…
Violent video games have triggered substantial controversy due to highly publicized incidents of youth violence that have been allegedly inspired by the content of such games. Several jurisdictions have passed legislation penalizing the distribution of violent video games to minors and used psychological research to support the justification for such laws. However, courts have consistently…
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More online discussion of the digital humanities. This post helped me as I start prying some piece of my brain away from the 3-week online course on gaming I’m currently teaching, and thinking about the “History and Future of the Book” course I’ll be teaching in 2 short weeks. One of the essays I most…
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