by Nick Montfort · November 15, 2008, 10:51 am
- James Wallis, in his presentation A Thing of Beauty is a Stout Green Toy, explains the relationship between the Oulipo, game books, and RPGs, also explaining why orcs are green and have upward-pointing tusks. (Thanks, Roger.)
- Jason Rohrer has a new game, Between, which is for two remote players, who interact only indirectly, and is hosted exclusively by Esquire. It’s up to you to determine whether or not the game is about masculinity.
- It’s been almost a year since an early version of this game was released, and it’s still apparently in stasis, but lovers of retro serious games (which have only become more topical) would do well to note Oil’s Well Redrilled, a remake of a Sierra On-Line game.
- “The Freeze” (one of the people who cracked this Apple ][ copy of Oil’s Well) now has a blog, Cracked by the Freeze. (Thanks, DJ Lone Wolf.)
- Jason Scott (the guy who runs the archive of crack screens from which this one was taken) is speaking Monday at 6pm at MIT in 14N-233 - this semester’s last talk in the Purple Blurb series. Jason, creator of a sprawling video documentary about computer bulletin board systems, and who is now in post-production with Get Lamp (the interactive fiction documentary) and in production with another documentary called Arcade, will talk about digital media and writing from his unique and incisive perspective. Jason was co-founder of the demoparty Blockparty, is a regular speaker at the hacker conference DEF CON, blogs profusely at ASCII, and runs the largest archive of the text files that circulated on BBSs: textfiles.org.
November 15th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Notably, it was The (prolific) Freeze who lead a young version of me to believe that “cracking” was an essential part of the game development process. You need the coder, the artist, the musician, and the cracker!
November 18th, 2008 at 4:33 pm
Ian Bogost’s article on Between is the current cover story at Gamasutra.