Nick Tate had a rather thankless role in the cult British science-fiction show Space:1999. Note how the cheerful Disney guy, Mark Elliott, is skipping down the sidewalk at the end. Similar:The Child (TNG Rewatch: Season 2, Episode 1)Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generatio…CultureIPads in the classroom: The right way to use them, demonstrated by a…
New York Times:Mr. Fischer was the most powerful American player in history, and the most enigmatic. After scaling the heights of fame, he all but dropped out of chess, losing money and friends and living under self-imposed exile in Budapest, Japan, possibly in the Philippines and Switzerland, and finally in Iceland, moving there in 2005…
On Jan 14, Ian Bogost of Persuasive Games rolled out Fatworld — a digital work that illustrates the complex connections between health, class, economics, and politics, via the rhetoric of the sandbox game. A sandbox game features open-ended play, with no single predetermined “winning” outcome. A target-shooting game such as Space Invaders forces the player…
New York Times: (the NYT Peramalink generator seems to be down.) “If I can walk into the office of a member of Congress and tell them we have 20,000 voters in their state who are already signed up to write letters and act based on game-related issues that concern them, that’s powerful,” he said. The…
The Double-Tongued Dictionary cited one of my blog entries as a source for the word “quizzam,” which is a word I use to let students know that a scheduled quiz might be harder than they expect. That blog entry was actually written in iambic pentameter, since I wrote it on my annual “Blog in Blank…
C|Net: Under the agreement, MySpace has pledged to work with the attorneys general on a set of principles to combat harmful material on social-networking sites (pornography, harassment, cyberbullying, and identity theft, among other issues), better educate parents and schools about online threats, cooperate with law enforcement officials around the country, as well as develop new…
Times Online: On the evening of Saturday January 17, 1998, the internet gossip merchant Matt Drudge posted a story that opened the most sensational scandal season in the history of the American presidency. He reported that Newsweek magazine had killed a story about President Clinton’s sexual relationship with a former intern. The next day he…
FATWORLD is a video game about the politics of nutrition. It explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and socioeconomics in the contemporary U.S. The game’s goal is not to tell people what to eat or how to exercise, but to demonstrate the complex, interwoven relationships between nutrition and factors like budgets, the physical world, subsidies,…
From the Chronicle: On an afternoon this fall, nearly all of the 15 computers were in use, and students stared in concentration — some gunning down bad guys in Counter-Strike, others strumming along with Guitar Hero. No one was doing any classwork. But the goal of the lab is very much college-related. It is to…
An opinion published in the Robert Morris University student newspaper: The purpose of a university newspaper is not to depict students or the school in a negative light, but to talk about positive stories, current events, campus activities etc. Now imagine a high school kid looking to come to RMU, a parent wishing to send…
From the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required) Billed as a “social-network monitoring service” and marketed exclusively to college athletics departments, YouDiligence was on display at a trade show here during the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual convention. The program is designed to conduct real-time searches of Facebook and MySpace for up to 500 objectionable…
Terry Harpold (Game Studies 7.1) uses Zork as one example in this article. Common threshold structures of the world – closed doors or windows, elevators, magical portals – often fulfil this dual function. Segmenting spaces of the world in a way that is easily accepted by the player, they may also mask computational latencies (the…
One hundred different people hitting a drum, from age 1 to 100. A short film by Lenka Clayton and James Price. Similar:Letter of Recommendation: Fanny PacksWhat other accessory ensures the safety …CultureDespicable Me 2 "Bottom" gag will do for A Midsummer Night's Dream what Disney's Little Me…The name “Bottom” in A Midsummer Night’s…CultureMinneapolis Police Injure,…
Excellent three-part post from Lisa Spiro. People, this is the kind of thing Vannevar Bush imagined scholars would do when he dreamed up the Memex — saving each other time by sharing annotated lists. This blog has landed on my RSS list. Part 1 and Part 2 are up; I’ll add the link to Part…
A student in my Video Game Culture and Theory course, when writing a reaction to playing Andrew Plotkin’s Shade, referred to a casual gaming genre that was new to me, the point-and-click “escape the room” game. The Wikipeidia entry for Escape the Room mentioned a key-retrieval puzzle from Zork, but I thought that passage had…
Language Log quotes a recent paper: In the spring of 2004, a number of middle and high school teachers enrolled in a graduate linguistics class for teachers noted that their students at certain city schools were using yo in place of he or she. The authors collected spontaneous occurrences of the pronoun and then designed…
It’s always hard for the kids to make the transition to “Daddy is working” when, from their perspective, it looks like I’m just tapping away at my computer, as I often do in my spare time. When my wife interrupted me to ask me to get something down from a high shelf, I had just…
I don’t remember where I was when I saw a link to Cursor*10. I thought “Cooperate by oneself” was a good example of “All your base are belong to us” English, but it actually makes sense. It’s like time travel. Very cool. Similar:The Emissary (ST:TNG Rewatch: Season Two, Episode 20) — Enjoyable Worf-centered RomanceRewatching…
Jay Dixit, in Psychology Today, surveys research that considers dreams to be the brain’s training grounds for real-world emergencies. The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost…
I’m putting the final touches on materials for my Video Game Culture and Theory course, which starts tomorrow. But earlier today I took a break so that the family could say goodbye to my Christmas break by catching a movie. We saw The Water Horse, which is a great family film (in that the kids…