Flak Magazine: Baking a Progress Quest, 12-17-02 is an article about the game Progress Quest which satirizes RPGs. You run it, you chose your character, and then it just runs a story that never ends.
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Go West – Immigration Video Game
“Go West” is a game by Gentian Shkurti that is about escaping Albania to emmigrate to Italy. It looks like a first person shooter that calls into question certain issues.
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Rebecca V.1
Rebecca v.1
v.1 of Rebecca can be played without specialized software. You only need access to a server with the appropriate programming tools. The system is set up so that the players have Read, Write and Execute access to a directory. The start.text is placed in a subdirectory called “startText”. As each player makes a move they must create a new subdirectory with their initials and the number of the move. In that subdirectory they should place their code (move.program) and the output.text. In the game root directory there should be a shared html file called game.html that is used to keep track of the moves and which has links to the moves.
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Skins
How do we approach skins as a research issue?
The following is from a note I sent Ruth Nichols who is doing her M.Sc. thesis on skins and UI at McMaster.
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Rebecca 2
Rebecca is the daughter of Ivanhoe game that Steve Ramsay and I have been trying to imagine. (See previous Rebecca post.) Here are some more thoughts on features to the game.
– Limiting moves to the output of others
– Algorithmic spirit
– Challenges
– Journals
– Code and Literary Programming
– Literary Moves
– A Game of Collaborative Algorithmic Interpretation
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Tufte on PowerPoint
Edward Tufte: Books – Essay: The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint is a great short work on the problems of PowerPoint as a communications aide. How can we do better?
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IATH 10th Anniversary Symposium
Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities had a 10th anniversay symposium to which I was invited. The celebration both looked back at the birth of IATH and looked forward. Some excellent talks. I think I rather like such events.
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Rebecca
The Rebecca Game is a child response to the Ivanhoe game. Games like Ivanhoe are interventions and Rebecca, as its given name suggests, is an intervention after Ivanhoe. It is entranced by Ivanhoe. It is a daughter.
These notes are from my conversation with Steve Ramsay.
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Library Facts
Libraries: How They Stack Up by the Online Computer Library Center is a short set of facts about libraries. For example US libraries spend $14 billion a year out of a total of $31 billion spend on books. U.S. libraries circulated four times as many items as Amazon each day.
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E-Books
E-Book Scenarios Updated is an article looking back at predictions about e-books. E-books didn’t take off the way the author expected – we don’t all have readers in our pockets. He does however see some clear trends: Use, Not Read; Aggregations, Not Single Works; Instutional Customers, Not Individuals; and Subscription Pricing, Not Transactional.
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