By virtue of teaching my "Death in the Digital Age" course, my beat has become AI griefbots that appear to let you talk to dead loved ones. Spoiler 1: they do not. Spoiler 2: capitalism.
I love how Jason Dyer's look at this old CoCo graphical text adventure game begins with the true story of an Intel chip-stealing ring in the early 1980s. Wild times in Silicon Valley!
AITK is a fantastic set of Google Colab notebooks for getting non-computer science undergrads working with the basics of machine learning and neural networks, designed by 3 SLAC professors. Gonna use this in my "Critical AI Studies" course next spring.
One of the many cool things I learned at #narrascope (not even in a talk but rather in the kind of accidental side conversation at a bar that makes conference-going worthwhile) is Colin Post’s project to acquire and read every one of the dozens of hypertext novels published by Eastgate in the 80s and 90s—works that are totally inaccessible on modern operating systems.
From Ars Technica, a fun romp through fifty or so years of interactive fiction history, which—surprise!—is not history at all, but alive and thriving (as I write from the 2024 Narrascope conference).
Another creepy, understated game by litrouke, showing once again that Twine doesn't necessarily mean a bunch of branching decisions. A retelling of the Bluebeard tale to boot.
Just because you’re an elite private school with billions of dollars doesn’t mean you have a backbone. (Maybe because you’re an elite private school with billions of dollars you don’t have a backbone.)
A manifesto for the liberal arts, which, at their root, prepare you for the things you can't prepare for. What does the future hold? "You don’t know. Your teacher doesn’t know. Your school doesn’t know. Your future employer doesn’t know. Nobody knows. Not really."
Companion piece to Jentery's "Before You Make a Thing," this is not just an incredible list of prototyping techniques, it also makes an argument for prototyping as a critical methodology for understanding the world.
In the 1920s Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of that most rational of detectives, Sherlock Holmes, published "The Coming of the Fairies"—about the incontrovertible photographic evidence of the existence of fae folk.
“A recent Stanford study found that some people credit Replika for saving their lives. But chatbots can be unpredictable, and users have also blamed the chatbot app for throwing them into mental crises.”
Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage.
Voices of people lost to gun violence have been re-created using AI to call for action, now six years to the day after the Parkland shooting that killed 17
"We are paying attention to ourselves in an odd way"—yes! This idea from @lmsacasas is something I haven't been able to put my finger on until now about teaching through video.
Pierre Chevalier's "Destroy / Wait" is another dilemma game in Twine, with every move a choice between the two title actions. An existential god game that undoes the meaning of "god" game.
Pierre Chevalier's "Destroy / Wait" is another dilemma game in Twine, with every move a choice between the two title actions. An existential god game that undoes the meaning of "god" game.
Do you or don't you punch a Nazi? A Twine game by Rex Mundane. The graphics and text don't necessarily tell the same story. Also notable for being a "dilemma" game, where every move is a choice between two opposing choices.
Do you or don't you punch a Nazi? A Twine game by Rex Mundane. The graphics and text don't necessarily tell the same story. Also notable for being a "dilemma" game, where every move is a choice between two opposing choices.
I don't agree with every rule here by a long shot. These are more like "things to think about" when creating a certain kind of interactive fiction game.
I don't agree with every rule here by a long shot. These are more like "things to think about" when creating a certain kind of interactive fiction game.
The traps that discussions about AI ethics fall into. Especially appreciate "the rule of law" trap, wherein we assume laws about AI will inherently be ethical.
The traps that discussions about AI ethics fall into. Especially appreciate "the rule of law" trap, wherein we assume laws about AI will inherently be ethical.
Perfect timing for this NYT article on contemporary mediums. Just yesterday in DIG 215 we were talking about the Fox sisters and their "spiritual telegraph" to the afterlife.
Perfect timing for this NYT article on contemporary mediums. Just yesterday in DIG 215 we were talking about the Fox sisters and their "spiritual telegraph" to the afterlife.