Socrates' Criticism of the Written Word Echoes Those Agai...

En la época de Sócrates, los textos escritos aún no eran una herramienta habitual y todavía despertaban recelos. Los consideraban un sucedáneo de la palabra oral — liviana, alada, sagrada—. Aunque la Atenas del siglo V a. C. ya contaba con un incipiente comercio de libros, no sería hasta un siglo después, en tiempos de Aristóteles, cuando se llegase a contemplar sin extrañeza el hábito de leer. Para Sócrates, los libros eran ayudas de la memoria y el conocimiento, pero pensaba ...

 Early Anti-Piracy Measures Made Digital Preservation Diff...

Unfortunately for posterity, and for those who purchased and interacted with Moonmist when it was first released, Infocom chose not to include the descriptions of the world in the software at all. In order to figure out what the player character's surroundings are like, the interactor has to consult the manual, which has to be kept on hand during play and read alongside the computer text. This was done to make illegal copying of the game difficult-the nondigital manual would have to be copied...

 Zork's Inaccessibility Shielded it from the Satanic Panic

Gathering treasure is an important part of Zork II, but assembling the booty in a trophy case is not the ultimate goal. In order to win, the interactor must have the player character supply these treasures to a powerful demon. This demon (like the robot) will do the adventurer a critical service-after he is propitiated. From the standpoint of the adventurer, Zork II adds a new and innovative motivation to the usual drive to plunder: Satanism. Such demonic elements were also found in Zork: The...

 D&D Was Inspired by More Than LOTR

The extent to which Dungeons and Dragons is inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien's work has frequently been misunderstood and overstated. Although Tolkien's books are obviously important to the fantasy genre and were influential on many particular Dungeons and Dragons campaigns undertaken by groups of players, Tolkien can sometimes seem the single straw that those unfamiliar with fantasy and adventure writing grasp at when trying to understand where this game came from and how to situate it vis-a-vi...

 Riddles Present New Ways of Looking at Things

The riddle can accomplish certain things by inviting the riddlee to awaken to a new vision of the world. It is not a form well suited to all sorts of discourse, however. According to Cohen (1996), It is clear that the riddle is not the best way of communicating about unknown things. If we want to learn from another person about something that he knows and we do not, a genuine question would serve us better than any riddle. On the other hand, if we want to communicate our experiences and our...

 Interactive Fiction, Like Riddles, Lack Replay Value

Infocom's interactive fiction, like most interactive fiction, is generally held by players to not have replay value in the usual sense, much as one cannot simply "replay" a riddle to which one knows the answer (although one can pose it to another, think about it again once the answer has been forgotten, or appreciate it in new ways with knowledge of the solution). Critics have noted that "once this kind of finite interactive fiction has been mastered, it generally ceases to hold the reader's ...

 Arabian Quote About Wisdom

“He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool; shun him. He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a student; Teach him. He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep; Wake him. He who knows, and knows that he knows not, is Wise; Follow him.” ― Arabian

 Racial Alignments in DnD

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, th...

 Alan Watts on Aging

When you grow old, something extraordinary begins to happen. Not to your body, which inevitably weakens, but to your awareness. You start to see time not as a road that stretches endlessly ahead, but as a circle closing in on itself. You realize that all the things you once thought mattered, possessions, opinions, victories, begin to lose their grip on you. And in that moment, a quiet voice seems to whisper, "Be careful." When the body begins to slow and the years seem to slip through your ...

 Interactive Fiction has "Potential Narrative"

A work of IF is not itself a narrative; it is an interactive computer program. A narrative is “the representation of real or fictive events and situations in a time sequence” (Prince 1980, 180); this can result from an interactive session but does not describe any IF work itself. Similarly, interactive fiction is not a story in the sense of the things that happen in a narrative, or more precisely, “the content plane of narrative as opposed to its expression or discourse; the ‘what’ ...