Today, it’s the Wild West and you’re not competing with the next guy who’s doing morning drive, you’re competing with every comedian who has a podcast. You may be funnier than the guy down the dial, but you might not be funnier than Marc Maron, and you’re up against all of them now. Listen: you can start a podcast, everyone can start a podcast—but you got to get listeners.

While iPod sales weren’t pushed by podcasting, making smaller, cheaper, and better hardware devices was certainly appealing to podcast fans.

Winer released a Grateful Dead recording via RSS—a proto-podcast, if you will.

From this theoretical and analytical point of view, characters in a story do not act the way they act because of who, what or how they are, but they are who, what and how they are because of what they do. A character doesn’t act in a particular way because of his or her psychological, intellectual or physical endowment, but he or she is endowed with certain psychological, cognitive and physical traits to make his or her actions believable and acceptable. From a formalist and structuralist point of view, the psychological traits of a character are part of the motivation and motivation is from this perspective a justification a posteriori that explains and naturalizes the character’s actions (Genette, 1969; Bordwell, 1985). For structuralist and formalist theorists, then, the function of a character’s personal traits is similar as to what the function of the personal traits of game characters is for game designers: “colour.”

The general exclusion of women from video-gaming framescan be viewed as part of a broader power issue in gender and technoliteracy.

Conservative pundits repeatedly castigatedvideo games and television as enabling irresponsible parents–mostly said tobe single mothers–to rely on an electronic babysitter instead of providingdecent parenting.

promotion of low culture

gambling

For many parents,the problem is not what their children are doing on their Nintendo systems,but what they arenotdoing while locked inMortal Kombat- reading books,playing outdoors, making friends’

anomie

Prior tothis period, arcades were framed entirely as places of safety, positive socializa-tion and even racial harmony:‘Look at all these people together–blacks,whites, Puerto Ricans, Chinese. This is probably the one place in Boston wherethere are not hassles about race’

Later stories focused on the high statusof ace players, but, with the vilification of arcades, the ace gave way to the‘computer nerd’stereotype or the awkward boy who turned to machinesbecause he was unable to connect with other human beings.

It was not until home unitsfirst gained widespread popular-ity in 1981 and 1982 that adults suddenly began to be framed as shameful ordeviant in their game use, and it was not until the late 1990s that this framebegan to dissipate.

Girls were also depicted as decidedly social intheir game use, whereas boys were framed as isolated:‘These games, unlikethe single-player games targeted at boys, are designed for crowding around thecomputer and playing as a group’

females were decidedly morefilled withsugar, spice and intelligence, but often with a lack of interest in technology.

These younger cohorts, sometimes labelled as Generations‘X’and‘Y,’have now reached maturity and exhibit leisure preferences different than theBaby Boom generation, particularly in their use of technology.

f thetabula rasaof the new technology is quickly covered by social anxieties andaspirations, we can learn much by looking at those coverings.

hey say that women view the games as black holes, soaking up maleattention, and that even liberated wives are made nervous when their male protectors actlike little boys

oys, unlike girls, were alsodescribed as preferring repetition and less cognitive effort in their video games(Thomas 1996b), and in being concerned with games of reflex and skill ratherthan intelligence and strategy

deep, primal leve

he snakes,snails and puppy dog tails were implied to be natural ingredients, the resultsof which were hopelessly violent boys.

But even with this growing respect, cultural critics still suggest thatgames are incapable of creating artistic experience in the way movies can

qualitative frame analysi

News media increasinglyserved as a conduit for anti-feminist, and often anti-mother, rhetoric in the1980s (Faludi 1991), and, despite real gender progress in news rooms, journal-ism continued to be a profession dominated by men

For families of all descriptions time became scarcer,while disposable income for leisure increased. This combination impacted leis-ure activities, which became‘intense, frenzied, and compressed instead ofevenly metered throughout the year’

The portrayal of science and technology isespecially subject to media framing because audiences must rely on experts andjournalists to make sense of new, and sometimes confusing, information

ironically often the use of a previously feared medium

For radio, itwas a major change in attitudes about race and sexuality

nickelodeon,

Ignoring these social factors, or pretending that they are not there, limits ourability to understand new media clearly.

But with the exception of violence effects studies on children, andsome recent work on gender and identity in gaming, the video-game industry –which in 1999 equalled motion pictures in domestic revenues (Graser 2000) –remains largely ignored by communication studies scholars.

“Not only did I make a game that came in first,” he says, “I made a game that’s a queer story that came first.”

In Harmonia, by Liza Daly, you play an adjunct professor investigating the disappearance of the person whose class you’re teaching. Most of the choices in the game are about how deeply you want to dig into the text. Links lead to footnotes. The world isn’t made of rooms, but of historical facts.

Technically, howling dogs is a “choice” game, where paths branch and the reader chooses the next move, but the choices don’t drive the plot.

To this day, entries in IFComp are supposed to be playable in under two hours.

In the 1990s, people nostalgic for these games found their ways to Usenet boards for interactive fiction, where Infocom fans gathered along with people experimenting with hypertext fiction, in which links let stories branch and move in ways impossible on the printed page.

Then graphics appeared, and fewer people wanted to play games with only words when pictures were an option.

A piece of interactive fiction was the spark that grew into the misogynist controversy known as Gamergate,

But interactive fiction can do much more than strand you in the past with Maya warriors or leave you stumbling around a dungeon for hours. A game might cast you a person struggling with depression, put you in conversation with a piece of art, or require that you eat your way out of a castle made of food.

Noteven a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing.

hat I never had been bor-r-r-r-n!

Irealized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works.

I did not read books the first summer; I hoed beans.

We spendmore on almost any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our mental aliment. It is time that wehad uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men andwomen

We are underbred and low-lived and illiterate;and in this respect I confess I do not make any very broad distinction between the illiterateness ofmy townsman who cannot read at all and the illiterateness of him who has learned to read only whatis for children and feeble intellects.

If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. Theyread the nine thousandth tale about Zebulon and Sophronia, and how they loved as none had everloved before, and neither did the course of their true love run smooth—at any rate, how it did runand stumble, and get up again and go on

perchance have been convicted by the wisdom of one good book, the Bible, and for the rest of theirlives vegetate and dissipate their faculties in what is called easy reading.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were writtenmust have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that notranscript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may beregarded as such a transcript.

With

or Sunday is the fit conclusion of an ill-spentweek, and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one

lmost the last significantscrap of news from that quarter was the revolution of 1649;

he penny-post is, commonly,an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so oftensafely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If weread of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vesselwrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dogkilled, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another.

Formost men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God,and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoyhim forever."

ll intelligences awake withthe morning

Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to thoseeras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewednightly by astronomers.

not by having imprisonedone, but having caged myself near them

The real attractions of the Hollowell farm, to me, were: its complete retirement, being, about twomiles from the village, half a mile from the nearest neighbor, and separated from the highway by abroad field; its bounding on the river, which the owner said protected it by its fogs from frosts in thespring, though that was nothing to me; the gray color and ruinous state of the house and barn, and thedilapidated fences, which put such an interval between me and the last occupant

I found thus that I had been a rich man without any damage to my poverty.

or a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone

At a certain

The books were even blamed for a handful of murders and suicides committed by young boys

The cheapness that had made them so unsuitable for fine books and government records made them excellent fodder for experimental, unusual, and controversial literary developments.

No longer was literacy necessarily a signifier of wealth, class, and status. This abrupt change created a moral panic as members of the traditional reading classes argued over who had the right to information—and what kind of information ought to be available at all.