Grand Text Auto

I can no longer keep myself from commenting on the Facebook “emotional manipulation” study. Alas. Here are several points.

• Do you want your money back?
• Don’t we only know about this study done on 689,003 people because it was written up and reported on in a prestigious journal?
• Could it be that other studies might have been done, or might be going on right now, or might happen in the future, and we might know nothing about them because their results will be kept as proprietary information?

Dear Mr. Montfort,

I do not want to cause offense, merely offer a suggestion: would you
consider removing the parts of your blog that clearly do not deal with
interactive fiction from “Planet IF” (http://www.planet-if.com)?

While I am not saying that your posts are not intersting or that the term
“interactive fiction” should only apply to text adventure games in the
narrow sense (and while I appreciate the articles on Game Design and other
forms of interactive fiction that appear on Planet IF), the sheer volume of
your blog posts, along with “Grand Text Auto”, sometimes tends to drown out
anything else.

I’ve made some hopefully superficial changes to the non-blog part of my website, nickm.com. Please let me know if you notice that I broke anything.

Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin), is now back as an aggregator of four blogs by the original GTxA authors, including this one. Check it out.