One of the really interesting things about the social-network-oriented website for the Obama campaign, my.barackobama.com, was the fact that it was essentially an online nexus that connected people who were interested in political and social change. And as Henry Jenkins mentioned in February, what Obama has created over the past year has not been a campaign, but a movement that would have lived on even if he’d lost the election. ... Read more

I recently spent time making Parchment work properly on my new iPhone 3G. The iPhone has been my first foray into the world of the mobile web, and getting Parchment to work well on it was an interesting experience. Some of the challenges I faced involved getting the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard to display properly—Parchment doesn’t actually have any text input fields on it, so by default the iPhone didn’t think that users had to enter text—and modifying some processor-intensive JavaScript code so that the iPhone didn’t think that Parchment had gone into an infinite loop. ... Read more

A few weeks ago, I started a small project to create a user interface for something called a Z-Machine: a virtual machine created by Infocom in the late 1970’s to run their text adventure games—the most famous among them being Zork, which is apparently what the “Z” in Z-Machine stands for. These games, as their name suggests, are completely text-based; Infocom’s 1984 masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, opens with this passage: ... Read more

Back in 2005, I wrote a tentative article for The Game Chair titled Information Complexity and the Downfall of the Adventure Game, but due to some annoying legal issues, it never got published there. A little under a year ago, I contacted my favorite gaming magazine, The Escapist, to see if they’d be interested in publishing it, and they were. It was subsequently featured in issue 116 last September, but I just realized that I never mentioned it here. ... Read more

Breaking the drake's will was the easy part.

The dragon "Emberstrife" faltered before her, his wings flailing in the air, struggling to support his massive and broken frame. Ichor fell from his wounds, sizzling into the water below him in a crimson torrent.

... Read more

Last week, I spent a few days on Second Life and read The Unofficial Tourists’ Guide.

... Read more

GuildPal is a World of Warcraft addon that adds two simple slash commands to your World of Warcraft interface, intended to facilitate the communication between members of a growing guild.

... Read more

I recently played through the single-player demo of Monolith’s upcoming suspense-themed first-person shooter, F.E.A.R., and decided to write about it.

... Read more

This game is not fun. I don't mean that as an insult; it's just an observation. I mean, how could mediating an argument that may result in the dissolution of a marriage possibly be amusing? There's a good reason that the authors call this an interactive drama and not a game.

... Read more

Gaming is born of conflict. From chess to Super Mario Bros. to Halo, it's always had something to do with disharmony, the player's mission to set things right being the impetus for gameplay.

It's no surprise, then, that the story of Façade, a one-act interactive drama, involves a battle of wills and charged emotion. Being the mediator in a pivotal argument that could easily lead to the dissolution of a marriage is probably about as tenuous as being caught in the line of fire between two opposing armies, if not moreso, and Façade faithfully depicts this psychological battleground with terrifying aplomb.

... Read more