Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload. This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code…
The interactive fiction concept might be spreading. Next year, HarperCollins plans to release Pretty Little Mistakes, a 600-page Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type novel for adults by Heather McElhatton. Depending on the decisions made by the reader, the main character’s options include becoming an actress, an art thief, a cult member, or a murderer. —Aman Batheja —Choose-your-own-adventure novels making…
I was a huge fan of Lucasarts’ adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics – and what graphics! – but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy – nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible…
So which is more sacred? The right to have your dog crap where it pleases? Or the right to privacy? You be the judge. —Puppy Poo Girl (Japundit) I think we’ve all fantasized about somehow “getting back” at people who are rude or inconsiderate in public. Did the young woman in question lose her right to…
—The Information Machine (YouTube) A fascinating vintage piece of rhetoric. It skips a bit in the opening, but settles down quickly. The images of room-sized computers and stacks of punch cards made me swoon. The narrator’s patient voice and the final image — of a rose fading into a heart — show an concerted effort to…
“Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor,” Hein marveled. It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in Iraq is descended…
Nowadays, when I sit down to read a book it is so hard to like it. I have forced myself to stare at a page for as long as it takes before I could grasp what I was reading. My attention span for slow paced readings and a teacher standing at the front of the…
Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their “opportunity,” specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they’ll…
A look at the documented deaths at Disney’s two theme parks in Florida and California since 1989: —Boy, 12, dies after riding Disney World roller coaster (Herald Today.com) Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Considering the number of people who go through the park, it’s not suprirsing that people die when they happen to be there. Similar:Self-referential…
Adorno once wrote “it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz”. Based on what we previously described, it seems that it would definitively be barbaric to create videogames about Auschwitz. However, if we could find a kind of environment where actions are irreversible, some of the main obstacles for designing “serious” videogames would disappear.…
The former vice president’s movie — replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets — mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from…
A Jacksonville man says he was duped and robbed by two girls after attempting to meet with a woman he met on the internet. —Teenage Girls Rob Man they Met on MySpace (WOAI.com) I’m uncomfortable with the hype that presents the internet as dangerous (as opposed to the predictablity and passivity of TV). Even this “man…
This semester, I presented my undergraduates with a challenging course. I expected them to participate in class and keep up with assignments. I told them straight out that if they were not to come prepared, stay home. I did not coddle them. The best students thrived on the regimen. The lazy students of course hated…
If you believe the hype, blogs are as significant as the invention of the printing press for their ability to change the way the world will be seen. If on the other hand you believe the counter-hype, blogs are a self-indulgence which pander to dull people’s misguided beliefs that they have something interesting to say.…
Complete with the Bernie Mac perfect afro the redguardsman stared back at me in 1080i. His racial description? The most naturally talented warriors in Tamriel, the dark-skinned, wiry-haired Redguards of Hammerfell seem born to battle, though their pride and fierce independence of spirit makes them more suitable as scouts or skirmishers, or as free-ranging heroes…
This class is unique in many ways, the most prominent is that students learn how to create new media resources for education. As Gee noted, “When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” (2003, p. 16). In this course students must develop an instructional game where all game elements are…
Reflections on Keys for Writers (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m paging through Ann Raimes’s Keys for Writers, which I used to use when I taught freshman comp at my previous job, and which I’m coming back to in the fall as Seton Hill offers a new “Basic Composition” course for the first time. (Our freshman writing offering…
When a young St. Paul boy got to pick the theme for his third birthday party, he didn’t pick Nemo or the Wiggles or Dora the Explorer. He didn’t even pick his favorite sports team. Henry Schally picked “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”. His mother, Jennifer Schally, designed party hats complete with pictures of the…
Teenagers, in particular, provide a moving target for Internet researchers, remarks psychologist Kaveri Subrahmanyam of California State University in Los Angeles. “By the time you publish research on one type of Internet use, such as blogging, teenagers have moved on to something new, such as myspace,” she says, with a resigned chuckle. —Bruce Bower —Growing…
Keillor’s humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, “That’s true if you’re a pilgrim.” A decade later, a cartoon version…