In any field, it’s important to keep track of the underdogs — the new developments and theories, the older hypotheses once thought exhausted of information. Doesn’t matter if you’re in writing, physics, psychology, or athletics, keeping a broad horizon pays off. That’s what I’m doing here — showing you the underdogs of gaming. You might…
This allows us to see the underlying problem of digital game studies: ‘narratologists’ and ‘ludologists’ alike would rather be fragged to bits than make a negative value judgement. The reason for this is to be found in the history of game studies: once upon a time, videogames were only taken seriously by psychologists. They would…
The archetype of the mad scientist was Rotwang in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926). Played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Rotwang had unruly hair, a disabled hand, and obsessive research interests. He worked alone, and although he lived in a modern city that his inventions made function, he was like a 16th-century alchemist. —The Scientist on Camera (Slate) Hmm……
Millman, whose essay is called “Game Theory,” sees “Lost’s” structure attracting fans via familiarity: She thinks it works like an interactive video game. “The story line and the action develop on multiple levels. There are hidden clues that function like the Easter eggs in gaming,” says Millman. “‘Lost” is a big game, and the act…
— Reinhold Grether —Virtual Performance Bibliography (netzwissenschaft) Designed for courses “Theater and the Internet” & “The Digital Arena.” Similar:New York Times Ready to Charge Online ReadersI will miss it, but honestly, I do not s…BusinessFont vs Typeface: bold and italics are fonts, but Arial and Times New Roman are typefacesAestheticsDepression Dog Successfully Previewed HTML in DIY…
Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. “The language is created by the culture,” says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: “Live here and now.” The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being…
—Windows Noises by Colin Staples (Albino Blacksheep) Cool Flash movie. Similar:Why I Resist Web Redesigns (And Maybe You Do, Too)Words many of us never want to hear: “It…Aesthetics8 (Short Halloween film by Josh Reardon)My daughter and I appear in this short f…AestheticsAmazon may well be the most evil company in techLast week, I had a hardware…
My dissertation, Heretical Reading: Freedom as Question and Process in Postmodern American Novel and Technological Pedagogy, describes a method of reading with literary, disciplinary, and pedagogical implications. In literary terms, heretical reading refers to the way that the postmodern novelists Thomas Pynchon, Vladimir Nabokov, and Philip K. Dick read and appropriate Gnosticism in order to…
I envisioned possibly doing some documentary about arcades some time back. I even did some small bit of checkaround research on them. I was much more entranced by text adventures, of course, since that’s a pretty big challenge and there was a lot to consider in making a video documentary. So I’ve been working on…
Timbuktu and SHU (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Seton Hill University’s summer reading book is Timbuktu, a shaggy dog story. (Only the dog’s not so shaggy.) I stated reading while proctoring a final exam yesterday, and I finished it that evening during my son’s piano lesson. Reading the whole book (less than 200 pages) couldn’t have taken more…
Photon vs Electron (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My son at age 8 is turning out to be quite the science geek. While I was driving him home from piano lesson today, he asked me whether an electron is the smallest thing in the universe. I took at stab at it and guessed that maybe a photon is…
Unlike the villagers in the fable about the boy who cried wolf, educated American consumers always seem to have the time, the money, and the credulity to pay to hear one more time that we are just about to run out of everything, thanks to population growth. […] Troubled as the world may be today,…
Some of the features of paper are well known: Reading more than three pages of text on a screen makes your eyes bleed, but I can read paper for hours. You can underline, highlight, and annotate paper in a way that is still impossible with Web pages. And, of course, in the anarchy after The…
In a hole in the ground lives a hobbit. A nasty, dirty, wet hole contains ends of worms and an oozy smell. A dry, bare, sandy hole contains nothing to sit down on or eat. The hole in the ground is a hobbit hole. “That means comfort.” —Brian Slesinsky has some fun with Inform 7…
Chartres cathedral used to have an actual bazaar in it, in the middle ages – you could buy vegetables, or even livestock, and it must have been mayhem sometimes: but that was all right, because the occasional runaway piglet was never going to be able to knock over the columns holding up the walls. Well,…
Honor, with its emphasis on doing the right thing for its own sake, is no match for the anxious cynicism of many college students. This point was driven home to me by a junior I met last year in North Carolina. Why not cheat, he argued, given how many of America’s most successful people cut…
I think that ultimatley a videogame is just another medium for artistic expression. But, you do end up killing literally hundres of representations of high- schoolers. But ‘m not sure the ulitimate intention was to trivialize it. It seemed like the purpose was to expose people to what happened in a unique perspective. There are…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, when it comes to a story, I’d rather have the thousand words. — Dennis G. Jerz, on rec.arts.int-fiction (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Only the truly geeky will appreciate just what it means to find yourself in someone else’s Usenet tagline. I happened upon a reference to my name…
Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 11 — Curvy Organic Object (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s apparently an eggplant, but whatever it is, it’s curvy and organic, rather than blocky and angular, like every other 3D object I’ve ever created. I made it with Anim8or (a free 3D modeling program), after following (not all that rigidly) this eggplant tutorial.…
Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 10 — Why Hammer Isn’t Good for Fiddly Details or, The Mystery Room Revealed (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) These last few weeks were a bit crazy, so I fell a bit behind in my Half Life 2 modding. Instead, I spent some time working on two different conference proposals that deal with interactive…