The Making of Obsession
I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here’s the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games,… read more
Journalism at Play
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon Newsgames offers a broad and comprehensive look at the past, present, and future uses of videogames in journalism. Co-authored with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer. Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are… read more
Why I Am Interested in Both
Like every sane person who does anything in public, I egosearch to see how people are reacting to things I’m doing. I use a few tools, but mostly Icerocket, which offers a condensed view of blog, Twitter, news, and Facebook reactions to search terms. The latter results are new, thanks to Facebook’s recent privacy “upgrades” that allow wall posts to… read more
Our Winning Project in the 2010 Knight News Challenge
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s News Challenge award winners were announced Wednesday at MIT, and my project was among the 12 of 2,400 entries to have been awarded a grant. It’s research I’m working on with my colleague Michael Mateas (UC Santa Cruz). Here’s a summary of what we’re doing: Among the casualties of local newspaper cuts… read more
Graham has a short post up mentioning Heidegger’s distaste for the crossword puzzle. Given that we have a whole chapter about crosswords and related puzzles in Newsgames, I’m particularly keen to read this if anyone digs it up. Heidegger’s reaction was actually quite common. Some may not realize that the crossword puzzle incited a moral panic when it rose to… read more
You can now preorder Newsgames from Amazon.com. As I post this, the price is $16.47, which is pretty good for a hardcover. It’s possible the price will change, but it’s only likely to get cheaper if it does. Oh, and the October 2010 date is a books in print date. It should hit the streets by late summer, but I… read more
What Gripes about Apple tell us about Computational Literacy
I’ve been watching reactions to Apple’s controversial decision to prohibit the publication of iPhone applications created in environments other than Apple’s own. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g.,… read more
Richard Rorty on Politics, circa 1998
I’ve been reading a bunch of reviews, interviews, and other secondary materials about Richard Rorty in preparation for next week’s event at UC Irvine. Among the works that will get mention in my talk is the 1998 book Achieving Our Country. I thought I’d share a snippet from a Rorty interview in The Atlantic about the book: How do you… read more
Peter Gratton has been interviewing some of the authors of readings in his speculative realism class this term. The latest interview, with Jane Bennett just went online. Bennet is the author of this year’s
Cover, blurb, price, etc.
MIT Press has put up the informational webpage for Newsgames, and the book should be appearing in the catalog and in books in print (and therefore at Amazon et al) soon enough. You can read the description on the MIT Press site, and I’ve also pasted it below. The list price is $24.95, which I’d guess will translate into a… read more