Newsweek: The assumption that all videogames are toys for children rather than entertainment for a variety of different audiences is one of our pet peeves. It may seem innocuous, but it’s not only the foundation of continued attempts at the state and national level to regulate the sale and marketing of videogames, it’s also an…
Wired’s gaming blog ponders how one might play an official The Princess Bride game. Will you have to defend yourself against ROUSes? Perhaps duel against the six-fingered man? Maybe if you collect a certain number of buttercups you unlock a mini game where you have to figure out what the hell Fezzick is saying. We’ll…
Your grade for the peer-review exercise depends on the quantity and quality of the constructive feedback you provide to your peer. (So smile at the good and frown at the bad, but don’t make your peer feel very sad.) In the process, you will get specific, concrete peer feedback, which you can use to revise…
A Yahoo! developer reflects on the missed opportunities caused by the economic demands of the recording industry: If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and…
Mark Dery, on 10 Zen Monkeys Reporting — especially investigative reporting, the lifeblood of a truly adversarial press — is labor-intensive, money-sucking stuff, yet even The New York Times can’t figure out how to charge for its content in the Age of Rip, Burn, and Remix. To be sure, newspapers are hemorrhaging readers to the…
New York Times: Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game…
Inside Higher Ed: Virtually all college students come to campus with their own cell phones, but for privacy reasons, telecommunications companies require their subscribers to manually opt in to any mass alert service. The result is that in many cases, the primary obstacle to widespread campus access to text alerts is the students themselves. Similar:A…
CNN/AP The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food. But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the…
From the New Yorker: It may seem strange that this last observation could have surprised anyone, but in Galileo’s time people assumed that the Milky Way must be some kind of continuous substance. It truly resembled a streak of spilled liquid–our word “galaxy” comes from the Greek for milk–and it was so bright that it…
The Denver Post: The Colorado State University editor who used the F-word in the student newspaper will keep his job. My biggest reaction to the editorial was not simply that it used the F-word, it’s that the editorial was so poorly framed — it consisted entirely of four words, “Taser this … F*** BUSH.” I’m…
While doing some advanced preparation for an upcoming unit on statistics in my news writing class, I learned something new today (from Wikipedia). When coming across a statistic that looks like slam-dunk evidence of bias or wrongdoing, an activist will have a motivation to present that data to journalists in order to advance a particular…
Game Career Guide has an interview with some writers who work in the games industry. Hurrah for the liberal arts! I already knew in high school I wanted to work in entertainment, so I attended some special workshops called the Media Workshops in Hollywood. There I was advised to major in whatever I wanted in…
The New Yorker has an article about a bookstore that supplies custom-made libraries for purchase or, for comercial displays and movie sets, rental. Although prop books are meant to be seen and not read, they have to evoke a mise en scène, inside and out. For Indiana Jones, the filmmakers specified that the books cover…
I created a new handout that focuses on the efficient use of quoted material in MLA-style papers. Some of this material used to be part of a more general handout on using sources, but I think it will be more useful if I pull it out and create a new handout. An MLA-style paper does…
Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun imagining what an early, early draft of the Google home page might have looked like. Similar:Kristin and Haley's Discussion on Poe's "The Raven"I gave my literature students 30 minutes…AcademiaWhat Twitter Changes Might Mean for AcademicsThis is one of the reasons I still consi…AcademiaMy copy of Plotkin's…
Engadget: That’s right, the first 2600 units rolled off the assembly line in October of 1977, delighting both children and kids at heart with games like Pitfall and Pole Position, and helping distract the nation after the untimely death of the King, the tragic crash of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s plane, and Pele’s retirement. So here’s to…
Space.com: Fifty years ago this week, Sputnik Chief Designer Sergei Korolyov watched as a modified Russian missile launched into space from Kazakhstan’s lonely steppes carrying a very special payload. Sputnik 1 (“traveling companion” in Russian) was about the size of a basketball and weighed about 180 pounds. It was equipped with two radio transmitters and…
http://ifcomp.org/comp07/download.html Similar:In May, 2000, I was blogging about the 'I Love You' virus, hacking URLs, PG Wodehouse, and…In May, 2000, I was blogging about …AcademiaCookies. That is all.AestheticsMisSpelled: Premiering Oct 1In this podcast series, I voice a mage w…AmusingKeeping things in the proper perspective at 4Cs: Praise for my delivery of a line from Sta…Already…
ArsTechnica: Rumors of Google’s plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google’s current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps. I…
Daniel Radosh brings to the mainstream press (New York Times) an argument that games researchers have been making for years. If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways. The…