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…
I don’t usually link to sites that collect a bunch of links and serve them up on a page full of ads, but this is a pretty good list from Squidoo. Here you’ll find the educational sites where my kids play online, and that are most often recommended by other parents who value fun learning…
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 pifieErrol Download this MP3 Directly Similar:This is Ralph. Ralph is a concept, created by you while reading this.AmusingOpinion: Don’t Be Fooled by America’s Flattening CurveAnother example of effective new media d…Current_EventsFrisbee is a brand name, but how newsworthy is that?What would you do? Today I wrote 192 …AcademiaWoman comments on man's looks. Man FREAKS…
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.”…
>get text games Similar:Captain’s Holiday (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Three, Episode 19) Picard’s Archeologica…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break….AmusingBlender Griffin, Part 3Okay, that’s enough work for one evening…AestheticsWithout ComPUNction: Doing verbal battle at the O. Henry Pun-Off World Championships. “It doesn’t have to be good. It just ha…AestheticsTouch Me Now: York Plays 2025A cast of…
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…
Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying “I’m the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today,” which might well be true, but doesn’t exactly mean very much. Still, I’m thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott’s…
I’m looking for a current book that presents gaming theory at a level appropriate for a 200-level undergraduate course. I have only scanned through the section of Tanja Sihvonen’s work, Players Unleashed! Modding <i>The Sims</i> and the Culture of Gaming (PDF), that deals with Colossal Cave Adventure. I’m not too happy with what I found…
Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man) If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it’s the most exciting. Videogames…
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…
Teale Fristoe reviews The Great Flu. In the game, the player acts as the head of the World Pandemic Control during the outbreak of an unknown flu. As the game progresses, the player must take actions, such as dispatching research teams, dispensing medication and face masks, and closing schools and airports, in an attempt to…
I just noticed that Jason Scott has redesigned the home page for his film website. Good things are worth the wait. I’m content to wait. Similar:You're not going to read thisI ask my students to contextualize links…BusinessBreaking up with your favorite racist childhood classic booksA good article analyzes the strong cultu…Bookscopyranter: New Milwaukee Public Library…
Lunar Lander — the game — at 40. Among the millions who watched the Apollo 11 landing was a 17 year old Massachusetts high school student named Jim Storer. In the fall of 1969, around the time of the Apollo 12 launch, Storer took his inspiration to class with him. There, he programmed a simple…
It might sound like a logical extension from the likes of Buzz and You Don’t Know Jack, but you’ll have to believe that this [Xbox Live] game is ringing the death knell for game shows as loudly and vigorously as it possibly can. Why watch a game show, when you can participate? Why shout at the TV,…
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&DÂ to all of the many storygames that have followed it.…
I have to make a conscious effort to say “Grand Theft Auto” when I’m talking about the game. An excellent group blog begins its afterlife. Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah…
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,…
A few years ago it was enough for a game world to look realistic. Now, in its every action and reaction, it must behave realistically. Physics is what graphics was ten years ago – a yardstick to judge and compare games.– Keith Suart, Guardian The first article in a series. Similar:Self-referential capitalism; paradoxical fusion of…
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…