Author Archives: Ian Bogost

It’s interview season, apparently. I’ve done a number of interviews recently, and I figured it would be easier to link them all at once for my devoted readers enjoyment (that’s you). First, Laureano Ralon published oan interview with me on Figure/Ground Communications. The interview covers the state of scholarship and the academy, McLuhan, and game studies. Laureano has been conducted… read more

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the passage in The Imperative in which Alphonso Lingis discusses videogames (albeit in brief): But although we use our automobile only to roll to one end of the city and back again, transportation evokes the existence of remote and enchanted destinations or the roar of the sun and the wind in… read more

The Dutch newspaper Het Parool ran a story last Saturday about Cow Clicker. You can read a scan of the story below (in Dutch, click for the large version), but equally interesting to me is the fact that the paper put an enormous Cow Clicker cow on the front page of their media section (also below), just like Svenska Dagbladet… read more

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a paper titled “Asynchronous Multiplay” for the Other Players Conference on Multiplayer Phenomena, which was held at IT University, Copenhagen in December of that year. To give you an idea about how long ago 2004 was on the timescale of game development and game research, consider a few facts: Facebook was incorporated in… read more

I started working on my Atari “game poems” project A Slow Year almost exactly three years ago. I had spent an idle summer afternoon writing 6502 assembly on the couch, and the first versions of the summer game took form. Slowly, over time, the work revealed itself to me: a set of four 1k games, one for each season, inspired… read more

This is hard to explain. Something’s happening to Cow Clicker. Some months ago, evil bovine lords broke into Cow Clicker and started making demands. Their mysterious clues became the Cow ClickARG, which, Inception-like, sent up Alternate Reality Games from within the send-up of a Facebook game. Clues were scattered by the “bovine gods” around the globe, where “cowllective intelligence” helped… read more

If you liked my Latour Litanizer, a tool for creating lists of objects, then you’ll also like Darius Kazemi’s new little gizmo, Objects that are enumerated in Graham Harman’s “Prince of Networks”. Here’s what he did: I wrote a script to parse the original text [Prince of Networks] for things that are probably lists of objects, and then did a… read more

Jean Georges is one of four Michelin Three Star restaurants in New York city. It’s very French, so French that you’re just as likely to hear the language spoken as English. That and the environment in the main dining room—a single, enormous, plush chamber on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel—make the place feel monarchal and exotic. The… read more

I’m spending this week and the start of next putting the final touches on the limited editions of A Slow Year. This involves a lot of trimming and glueing, as I’m attaching images and plaques to their final homes on books and boxes. It’s hard to explain how good it feels to trim and glue paper instead of writing emails… read more

It’s hard to believe, but tomorrow will mark the fifth time Ian McCarthy and I will execute our Bloomsday on Twitter performance “Twittering Rocks.” (For more information, read here and here.) New this year: thanks to @francophony, you can follow all 50+ Ulysses characters via this convenient list. When we first started doing this in 2007, Twitter was still a… read more