How Literacy Impacts Reading and Gaming

For Ellie, that charade contributed to her waning interest in computer games and simulations fi-om its highpoint in middle childhood. Reasonably versed in computer technologies and a fan of emerging online forums such as Tumblr, she agreed to talk about her play in virtual worlds not as an enthusiast, but as something of a philistine. She enjoyed Second Life—but only up to a point. "The imaginative part stopped for me when I stopped designing my avatar," she told me. Further opportunities...

 RPG as a Game of Imagination

It's a game of your imagination, where you get to tell storeis by taking on the roles of the main chractes-characters you create. It's a game that offers a multitude of choices-more choices than even the most sophisticated computer game, because the only limit to what you can do is what you can imagine. The story unfolds like a movie, except all of the action takes place in your imagination. There's no script to follow, other than a rough outline used by the Gamemaster (GM): you decide what ...

 Smaller Fragments of Information Command Attention

I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling larger works into minor snippets for sale. Music albums are chopped up and sold as songs; movies become trailers, or even smaller video snips. (I find that many trailers really are be...

 How the Internet Serves as a Plot Device in Modern Story ...

In the tween movie Twilight, heroine Bella discovers that her boyfriend Edward is a vampire by consulting a website with a convenient link to supernatural occurrences in her very own tiny town. The Internet is here collectively written, but perfectly tailored to exactly her individual needs. It is not the wizened woman in the house down the road that holds the truth to Edward's identity, but an anonymous and multiply sourced repository of lore. A silent film would have cut to an intertitle t...