Competition without Conflict
Our good old board games are based on military themes (Risk, Stratego, Battleship, Chess). But new games, says David Fristrom, are as likely to be inspired by pizza construction or potato farming, attracting new players who are turned off by direct conflict as they are interested in the social aspects of games and their intellectual challenges.
David Friström asks: "Is it possible to have a good game without conflict between the players?"
Rise of Nations
"Winning is simple, losing is not", says Mark Bernstein, claiming that too much of current literature is focusing on the winning aspect in games. But what about loss? What does losing a game teach us? Bernstein plays "Rise of Nations".
Fiction
"The cognitive experience of learning to read in multiple directions at once so as to realign severed context is, to say the least, rather mind-bending," says George Landow in his introduction to Lyon's CellPoetics & TextStretcher.
Blog Spotlight
"More than one well-known science fiction author got his or her start by writing letters to a favorite science fiction magazine, and there is a rich history of amateur press activity in science fiction fandom." says Greg Beatty and asks: What are Science Ficion blogs doing - and are they worth reading?
Tools
For years, Frank Tansey perfected the art of filing avoidance. But when he came across Tinderbox, something changed.
Books
Anja Rau got herself a sexy little iShuffle. But... "..would one want to be seen with it in public, in the first place?" she asks, in this short, but insightful, review.
Paul Boczkowski spent more than a year as "a fly on the wall" in three American online news organisations. The result, says Fagerjord, is a "book so rich, and so clearly written, that it might even make Nicholas Negroponte change his mind."
How do you tell interactive stories? Can Writing for Interactive Media show you how? Greg Beatty has the answer.
Back Issues
TEKKA 8: The Wrong Fight II, Thinking outside the click II
TEKKA 7: The Wrong Fight, Thinking outside the click, Diet blogs
TEKKA 6: Semantic Web, Here be Matches
TEKKA 5: Digital Storytelling, Money With Blogs, The Blogosphere in Spain ...
TEKKA 4: Lazards Cybercafé, Portuguese Fishing Village, Conference Survival, Life With Master
TEKKA 3: Loot from Iraq (part 2), Weblogs Make Them Feel Free, Byzantine Hypertexts, The Possession of Christian Shaw
TEKKA 2: Loot from Iraq, The Perils of Personas, Artifactual Hypertext, Fast City
TEKKA 1: Hypertext binges, My Friend Hamlet, Blueprints from the Bauhaus
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