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Hitting the Books: The correct way to make coffee, according to science
The best part of waking up is, of course, hot bean juice in your cup.
Hitting the Books: Without glass, we'd have never discovered the electron
Glass is one of humanity's oldest technologies, but without it we'd have never invented television.
Hitting the Books: The story behind Instagram’s most famous filter
Systrom circled “photos.”
Hitting the Books: Brotopia
Welcome to Engadget's new series, Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.
Excerpt: Rise of the Videogame Zinesters
Anna Anthropy's forthcoming book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters is about the personal potential of games -- how simple tools allow all kinds of people to tell their own stories interactively. But it's also a clever, thoughtful examination on game design, and why the medium is important and interesting. In this excerpt from chapter three, "What is it Good For?," Anthropy examines games as "performances" and discusses the advantages computerized chance gives.THE WORLD'S A STAGE AND WE ARE PLAYERSOften, games -- particularly digital games, with their use of video and audio -- are compared to film, probably because the videogame publishing industry strongly resembles the Hollywood studio system. But I don think this comparison is particularly constructive, in that it gives us little insight into what the game, as a form, is capable of. Film tells a static story; what exciting about the game is that it allows the audience to interact with a set of rules. This doesn't mean the game can't tell a story: in the role-playing genre, the players aren't merely watching a story but playing the roles of the characters within the story.A better comparison than film is theater, which is where a lot of our game vocabulary ("the player," "stages," "set pieces," "scripting") comes from. A play defines the roles, events, and scenes of a story. An individual performance of those roles and scenes will always be different: different actors will perform the same role in different ways. Every performance and interpretation of a particular play is different -- sometimes in minute ways, sometimes in radical ways -- but we consider the play itself and the scene itself to be the same.
Excerpt: Behind-the-app book Buttonless explores Broken Sword
You'll be able to pick up Ryan Rigney's Buttonless: Incredible iPhone and iPad Games and the Stories Behind Them (available for pre-order now) on Dec. 13. To tide you over until then, we've got the sample below, just one of the dozens of fascinating stories you'll find in the book. In this chapter, Rigney explores the creation of adventure classic Broken Sword and how it made the leap to iOS. All Charles Cecil wants to do is create fantastic adventure games. After founding Revolution Software in 1990, Cecil led his team in the creation of two of the most critically acclaimed point-and-click adventure games ever: Lure of the Temptress in 1992 and the beloved Beneath a Steel Sky in 1994. Both were published by (the now defunct) Virgin Interactive. After both games found success, Virgin approached Revolution with demands for another, even bigger game. "Virgin said that it wanted to up the ante," says Cecil. "It wanted a game that was really cutting edge."
Random House teases first few pages of Elder Scrolls novel
Are you in the mood for some reading that's a bit heavier than the video game news post you're currently digesting? We suggest you check out this Random House page to read an excerpt from the first chapter of the Elder Scrolls-based novel, The Infernal City. The few pages of text introduce us to what will likely be the book's plucky protagonists, Annaïg and Mere-Glim. It's a pretty intriguing kick-off for the novel's plot -- however, the excerpt doesn't exactly sound like our usual experience in the Elder Scrolls world. See, in our version, the heroes would systematically rob everyone on the planet blind, and then, once bored with that, would just start killin'. It may not win any Pulitzers, but at least it's authentic.
Excerpt of the Stormrage Novel available online
I already mentioned that there's an excerpt from the upcoming Stormrage novel in the back of TokyoPop's Warcraft Legends Volume 5 manga, but if you're anxious to get yet another glimpse before February 2010, you're in luck. Pocket Books has posted a new excerpt over at their site, and all you need to grab is an email address. The excerpt doesn't reveal any new lore per se, but it does tease pretty damn well, and should bring up some pretty nostalgic memories for a lot of Alliance players. Combine this with the excerpt from the manga, and you'll get a pretty good idea of where the story's going, I think -- Right into the Heart of the Emerald Nightmare, as we confirmed with authour Richard Knaak at BlizzCon a week ago. As to whether it will cover the Cataclysm, or not, that's a bit up in the air. However, considering we know that Malfurion will be back in the waking world fighting Ragnaros at Hyjal, chances would seem to be good.You can check out the excerpt at Simon and Schuster's website.
