Notes on Nick Montfort
Two quick notes relating to friend and Racing the Beam coauthor Nick Montfort. First, he has a new blog, Post Position, which already boasts a number of insightful posts on games, IF, constraint, and other topics that will probably interest you if you are reading my site. Second, as Nick noted in passing in one of his post positional posts,… read more
Coverage of my GDC Talk
Lots to catch up on as I return to the real world from Spring Break and GDC. In the meantime, you can read Dan Terdiman’s coverage of my last GDC talk, Learning from the Atari 2600, over on CNet.com. Additionally, Amazon.com finally got Racing the Beam back in stock!
Wired's Chris Kohler on Racing the Beam
Chris Kohler, author of Power Up and games writer at Wired penned a nice piece on Racing the Beam for Wired’s Game|Life blog. One of the ideas we discuss in the book that Kohler picks up on is the fact that the Atari was manufactured and supported until 1992, albeit in increasingly smaller numbers. Today it’s almost impossible to imagine… read more
Michael Agger has written a nice piece in Slate about the Atari and Nick and my book Racing the Beam. The article does a great job characterizing the book and what we hoped to do with it. My favorite part comes at the end when Agger wonders aloud if a similar book could be written about the Nintendo Entertainment System… read more
Two Digital Video Discs
Speaking of the Atari VCS, Georgia Tech colleague David Terraso pointed out to me that the cover art for the third season DVD release of The Venture Bros. is styled after an original Atari game box. (Venture Bros. is one of the animated shows in Adult Swim on Cartoon Network.) The results are impressively styled indeed: I like how the… read more
Yin and Yang on the MIT Podcast
What does the Federal Reserve have to do with the Atari VCS? They are both the subject of this month’s MIT Press podcast. First, Stephen H. Axilrod talks about his book Inside the Fed: Monetary Policy and Its Management, Martin through Greenspan to Bernanke. Then I talk about my new book (co-authored with Nick Montfort), Racing the Beam: The Atari… read more
(or, Buy My New Book)
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System has been published and is now shipping from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller. The book, which I wrote in collaboration with Nick Montfort, is about the relationship between the hardware design of the Atari VCS, some of the games that were created for it, and those games’ influence on later titles and… read more
Two notes apropos of Graham Harman
Along with several others, contemporary philosopher Graham Harman has been instrumental in rekindling the thirsty brush of philosophy, igniting a new and exciting fire in this tired old field. It has become known as Speculative Realism. Harman’s work has become tremendously influential in my recent thinking, despite my not (yet) having made this influence as apparent in print as I… read more
Jane Austen on Facebook
In the vein of Hamlet in Facebook, here is Austenbook, a version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in Facebook News Feed format. Like Hamlet in Facebook, Austenbook is a hypothetical adaptation of literature for social media; it adds the look and feel of a newsfeed, but the latter’s writing isn’t as snappy as the former. Worse, the addition of… read more
Fandom and Detritus
One of my gripes with Henry Jenkins’s book Convergence Culture was its tendency to privilege pop cultural fan activity to other sorts of attention. Appealing though they may be, I wondered if Harry Potter and Survivor really sat at the pinnacle of human creativity in the way that the book implied. One of the problems that concerned me was the… read more