Search Results for Amazon.com

Game Developer Magazine holds an annual Front Line Awards, for “the year’s best game-making tools in the categories of programming, art, audio, game engine, middleware, and books.” Racing the Beam is among the finalists. We’re definitely an outlier, the other books covering much more “practical” development concerns (Game Coding Complete 3e, Game Engine Architecture, Mastering Unreal Technology, and Real Time… read more

Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She’s doing a feature for a local magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I’ve been fortunate to get a lot of press over the years, and it’s become increasingly important to me to find ways to make my work comprehensible and applicable to a general… read more

Atari has been through a lot as a company. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded it in 1972. They sold it to Warner Communication in 1976. Ray Kassar ran it through the crash of 1983, after which he was forced out due to accusations of insider trading. Warner split Atari into Atari Games (arcade) and Atari Consumer Electronics (hardware). The… read more

In June 2007, Ian McCarthy and I started performing Wandering Rocks on Twitter each Bloomsday. My original explanation of our project began with the phrase “I do not like Twitter.” I hadn’t realized it until today, but back in June (almost exactly two years after our first effort), my name appeared on a list of 100 Educators to Follow on… read more

Apparently my publisher has started issuing Kindle editions of my books. Two are now available in Amazon’s electronic format: Persuasive Games and Unit Operations. Readers might be interested to find that MIT Press seems to have taken up a different strategy with their electronic book pricing. Specifically, the Kindle editions do not necessarily cost less than the print books. To… read more

I’m not a big fan of fanfic, but I am quite enamored of appropriations of pop culture that shed surprising new light on their source material. For some time, my favorite example of this sort of thing has been Garfield Minus Garfield. By removing the titular cat from each comic strip, Dan Walsh exposed “the existential angst of a certain… read more

I realize the world is not entirely comprised of philosophy jokes, but sometimes it sure seems that way. I just came across this Personalized Name Gift – Husserl Mug on Amazon.com: Curious, but not chortle-inducing… until I read the product description: This is a brand new custom made coffee mug imprinted using the latest sublimation technology. This process embeds the… read more

Georgia Tech alumna Kate Compton has been working for Maxis on Spore for the past four years or so. Back when she was a masters student, she took my course on videogame translation and adaptation. This week, Kate announced a new official scenario for Spore Galactic Adventures, which she created based on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Given the pliant nature of… read more

Last week, the NY Times published Seth Schiesel’s effusive review of The Beatles: Rock Band. Calling the game a “transformative entertainment experience,” Schiesel argued that it “may be the most important video game yet made.” Schiesel’s logic is sensical: the combination of Beatles + videogame gives baby boomers something concrete to share with their kids and grandkids. Harmonix, a company… read more