Since the spring of 2012, Google has started to move from search of particular combinations of letters to searching things. This move from string-based search to searching things is a move towards Google building an ontology of things. The difference with searching things instead of strings is that Google can differentiate between homonyms, things that sound the same but are different. For example, if you think about Google itself, it is both a search engine and a company. And these are two different things, with different attributes. ...

In humanities research related to psychology there tends to be a tendency to look for answer from neurological research. Things like consciousness, language and learning are intimately connected to how the brain works. And understanding the neural underpinnings of our psychological processes tends to give as a better understanding how those processes work. This is very much related to my research, since meaning-making is something that necessarily involves cognitive processes. Should I then be looking at brain imaging data? Trying to pinpoint the areas active in different meaning-making situations? ...

I’m writing a paper about the tools authors can use in literature to convey certain meaning effects, but applied to video games. There are several tools available, but perhaps the most interesting is the concept of granularity. It seems that there is a natural level of schematicity in perception. That is, a level of attention that we are normally accustomed to, when we don’t pay any special attention to things. It is only when we focus our attention to specific things that we deviate from that basic level of attention. In literature studies the varying specificity of description is called granularity. ...

A couple of years back I ran a game of Dungeons & Discourse. It’s based on the brilliant web comic, Dresden Codak. It ran very smoothly, but mostly thanks to good luck and excellent players, not because of any brilliant design on my part. I used Donjon as the rules, and that worked surprisingly well. Donjon is designed for that kind of off-the-top-of-your-head kind of wild speculation Dungeons & Discourse seems to call for. ...

Len Talmy writes in Toward a Cognitive Semantics (2002) that: Any old tapestry or painting that in effect depicts a story by showing a number of figures and activities together suggesting a succession of events, but one that the viewer must piece together through her own self-determined sequence of visual fixations, is as much an example of interactive fiction as any modern computer-based form. (426) This is of course false, with any standard definition of interactivity. I think “modern computer-based form” is here a neat place-holder for games (other interactive digital works would also work), despite him not wanting to specify it. Computer games are of course more interactive than your typical painting. The key to understanding this is to separate interaction from interactivity. ...

It is very common for role-playing games to extend rules meant for one thing to cover other fields. The archetypical example of this is using combat rules for other conflicts. This has been the standard way of building rules since Dungeons & Dragons started extending rolls beyond hitting things. First, it was resistance rolls, then skill rolls, when adventuring needed to include things beyond monsters in damp caves. But the overall structure of things remained: you roll a D20 and add some bonus (possibly negative) to see if you succeeded. This is extending the original combat rules beyond the scope they were originally designed for. ...