It's All (About) Fun and Games

Peter Mawhorter offers up a reading list on games: For anyone curious about what I’ve been reading, here’s the list of what I’ve read to get an introduction to this area: “Why We Play Games: Four Keys to More Emotion Without Story” by Nicole Lazzaro. “GameFlow: A Model for Evalucating Player Enjoyment in Games” by…

Alice and Kev

Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter. Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished…

Walkthrough (Zork Funk)

Walkthrough pifieErrol Download this MP3 Directly Similar:Wendy's Bests Internet Troll, Then Unwittingly Posts Completely Unrelated, Obscure Racist …I fixed the clickbaity title for you. A …BusinessI, Borg (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 23) Adolescent Borg Bonds with LaForge Rewatching ST:TNG When a landing …CybercultureWhat Causes the Smell of New & Old Books?Generally, it is…

Federal Judge Rules Video Games are Protected "Expressive Works"

On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown’s claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are “expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment.”…

The 15th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition

>get text games Similar:Parable of the Polygons – a playable post on the shape of societyA very clever interactive essay that use…CultureHow My Mom Killed Facebook Lest you think this is just a compli…CybercultureNellie Bly statue to be unveiled at Pittsburgh airport ThursdayIn 1889, Bly became famous for an-around…AwesomeMaking a journalism game to teach myself…

Videogames now outperform Hollywood movies

Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it’s understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It’s a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population…

Idea to Implementation

I’ve been sitting on a particular interactive fiction work-in-progress for ten years. Ten years! Every so often I dust it off and add a little more, but I still haven’t finished the chore of converting it from Inform 6 to Inform 7.  And while hiding from this project, I went and released a different project…

Interactive fiction, from birth through precocious adolescence: a conversation with Jimmy Maher

A great interview, on Adventure Classic Gaming. Was something like Adventure inevitable? That’s a tough question, but I think probably so. I’d say that the real wild-card here is not Adventure but rather Adventure‘s inspiration, Dungeons and Dragons. You just can’t exaggerate the importance of D&D to all of the many storygames that have followed it.…

Coding as a General Education Requirement? Reflections on Inform 7 and Scratch.

At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy.   (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.) Here at Seton Hill,…

Becoming Informed

A former Infocom beta-tester re-discovers interactive fiction (and enters the interactive fiction competition) Back then in the mid-80s, the only (decent) interactive fiction was being produced by Infocom, the almost legendary, and now defunct, software company formed by a bunch of MIT grads. After cutting my teeth on the Zork series, Enchanter, Infidel, and Witness…