Halo and Philosophy
Did you enjoy reading The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy and World of Warcraft and Philosophy? Do you wish you’d written an article for a collection like that? Do you fancy yourself an elite supersoldier like Master Chief? Then maybe you should pen a chapter for the just-announced Halo and Philosophy anthology. Abstracts are due May 15. Go read the… read more
On the White House and Videogames
In a large theater at the 2010 Game Developers Conference, ten thousand game makers gathered for the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice awards ceremonies, where the best indie and mainstream games of the year are celebrated by and for their creators. In between the two, an unusual video was shown. Aneesh Chopra, the United States’s first Chief Technology… read more
Winner, Weirdest Use of a Combine Metaphor
From Moral Leadership in a Postmodern Age, by Ron Hill: If modernity acted like a combine harvester, sweeping away the old crop and transforming it into uniformly square bales, postmodernity allows some of the crops to survive and even to be replanted amidst the bales. It’s sort of awesome. Maybe just because I love combine harvesters.
The Urinal Sublime
I’m still working my way through Heavy Rain, and I’ll save my comments about the game until I finish. For now, I broke it in an interesting way that’s worth sharing. When you are playing as Norman Jayden in the police headquarters, it is possible to go into the men’s room. One plot element requires this, but later you can… read more
...but it's not necessarily informative
My next book, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (co-authored with my graduate students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), is being prepared for publication, and it should hit the streets in late summer of this year. In anticipation, I’ll try to offer some occasional previews of the content we cover in the book. One of the chapters in Newsgames covers infographics, exploring… read more
Louis Menand's new book on professors and professionalization
Via Peter Gratton, I’ve just read Slate’s detailed review of Louis Menand’s new book The Marketplace of Ideas, about the state of the university and the anxiety of the professoriate. Given that my own feelings about such matters are far less measured and far more informal than Menand’s, I’ll look forward to reading the book, since he clearly covers many… read more
Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities
In a reflection on all the recent hubbub about the sordid state of the humanities and the recently proposed possibility of a cure in the form of the “digital humanities,” Cathy Davidson offers the following lament: When I think of what the humanties offer…it is astonishing to me (and tragic) that we are not central. We are very, very good… read more
Making books appealing
Harman offers his thoughts on the virtues of short books, with a mention of the conversation he and I had in Cairo about the constraints of the Atari and how they relate metaphorically to book authoring. The flavor of the genial teasing seems to be “haha, getting lazy there, aren’t you?” But in fact, it is harder work to compress… read more
Mark Fisher on discipline and pedagogy
I read Mark Fisher’s excellent little book Capitalist Realism this week. It’s a short book long on insights, many of which provoked me, some of which I disagreed with, and a few of which I want to share. Here’s the first of the latter kind, from a discussion of the post-disciplinary nature of contemporary higher education. Ask students to read… read more
Generate your own Latour Litanies
In my book Alien Phenomenology, I coined the term “Latour Litany” for the lists of things in writing—whether in Bruno Latour’s or anyone else’s. The philosopher Graham Harman has also adopted this term, and in general it’s enjoyed some success as an appelation for “bestiaries of things,” as I’ve called them. Alien Phenomenology is a book about “pragmatic” speculative realism,… read more