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’ ...

 Tolkien's World Makes Race Scientific Rather Than Legalistic

The core of the problem is that Tolkien conflates race, culture, and ability. Hobbits, he says, are a race, and based upon a combination their hereditary traits and cultural practices, are better at being stealthy than other races. Tolkien does this throughout his novels, outlining the “racial” characteristics of men, of dwarves, of elves, of orcs, and those few of mixed ancestry (like Aragorn or the Uruk-Hai). As Helen Young, author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature put it in a re...

 The Screen Revolution is Breaking the Thread of Literacy

If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history. Our universities are at the front line of this crisis. They are now teaching their first truly “post-literate” cohorts of students, who have grown up almost entirely in the world of short-form video, computer games, addictive algorithms (and, increasingly, AI). Because ubiquitous m...

 Medieval Book Curse

Steal not this book my honest friend For fear the gallows should be your end, And when you die the Lord will say And where's the book you stole away?

 Caching in Public Libraries

...libraries are a natural example of a memory hierarchy when used in concert with our own desk space. In fact, libraries in themselves, with their various sections and storage facilities, are a great example of a memory hierarchy with multiple levels. As a consequence, they face all sorts of caching problems. They have to decide which books to put in the limited display space at the front of the library, which to keep in their stacks, and which to consign to offsite storage. The policy for w...

 Popular Books are Quickly Forgotten

Love your beloved classics now—because even now, few people read them, for the most part, and fewer still love them. In a century, they’ll probably be forgotten by all but a few eccentrics.   If it makes you feel any better, all fiction, even the books people love and rush to buy in droves, is subject to entropy. Consider, for example, the bestselling fiction novels of the week I was born, which was not so long ago. I’ve bolded the ones my local library currently has in stock. Hawaii,...

 LOTR Inspires Hikers

The Lord of the Rings fascination reaches far beyond trail names. It seemed like every AT shelter had “Not all who wander are lost” carved into it somewhere; the quote also serves as the most overused thru-hiking Instagram caption. It’s so ubiquitous that most a number of people don’t know it’s from Bilbo’s poem about Aragorn in The Fellowship of the Ring. “Second breakfast” is a beloved part of a hobbit’s diet and an essential part of a thru-hiker’s as well. And one time,...

 Insights on Being Well-Read

What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally i...

 Universality of Games

Just as the ancient and primitive religions of the world show profound similarities in their fertility rites and their sun and moon worship, many games appear to be common property to human beings everywhere. Indeed, the comparison is not at all farfetched: many games now thought to be mere children's pastimes are, in fact, relics of religious rituals, often dating back to the dawn of mankind. Tug of war, for example, is a dramatized struggle between natural forces; knucklebones were once par...

 There is No "Pokemon Gap"

While educators debated whether children learn to read best through drill-and-practice phonics or "whole language" instruction, Nintendo was, quite informally, teaching a generation of children how to read. Pokemon also taught children how to analyze and classify more than 700 different types of creatures through trading cards that were dense with specialized, technical, cross-referenced text. Gee would later call Pokemon "perhaps the best literacy curriculum ever conceived." He offered the o...