On elderly iPhones
Everyone knows that iPhones are manufactured with planned obsolescence built in: processors and RAM allocations that can’t keep up with operating system upgrades purposely designed not to account for earlier models. Apple makes too much of its profits from hardware sales, so handsets have become akin to fashion seasons. Hardware upgrades entail power and capacity. The new activities made possible… read more
Dr. Ian Bogost is an author, an award-winning game designer, and an interdisciplinary scholar. He is Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he holds faculty positions in the School of Arts & Sciences, the Sam Fox School of Art & Design, and the McKelvey School of Engineering. At WashU, Bogost is also the… read more
Why playing stupid games staves off existential despair
Games are grotesque. I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. Games are encounters with squalor. You don’t play a game to experience an… read more
Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds appointments in the School of Architecture and the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game… read more
These days, Apple is more properly thought of as a fashion label, not an electronics company.
When Apple launched the iPhone 4 in 2010, the company’s website featured large images of the device with the text “This changes everything. Again.” Change has been a constant refrain in Apple’s marketing over the years. The famous 1984 Macintosh ads framed the computer as an agent of revolution. And the “Think Different” ads of the 1990s implied that purchasing… read more
Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond
In recent weeks, Facebook has been sending emails imploring me to complete a survey about how they might improve their development platform. I’d been deleting the messages, but after the third request or so, I decided to click through. For those lucky enough to have avoided it, the Facebook Platform is a set of tools and services that allows developers… read more
The best metaphor for Google Glass? Not jerks or junkies, but the living dead.
Since the unveiling of Google Glass, the tech giant’s new wearable computing device, a common nickname for its wearers has arisen among skeptics and critics: Glassholes. It’s a charming portmanteau that satisfies an immediate desire to shun this weird new contraption. And the term fits, to some extent. As a strangely popular trend in books on assholes has helped us… read more
The inevitability of corporate content controls on MOOCs
Last week, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) president Robert Meister sent an open letter entitled “Can Venture Capital Deliver on the Promise of the Public University?” to MOOC provider Coursera’s CEO, Daphne Koller. The CUCFA has published the letter, which is sly, scathing, and deeply entertaining whether no matter where you locate your opinions on the… read more
Today, the most novel feature of new technology is ordinariness.
The logo for the Dutch videogame studio Guerrilla Games is an object lesson in mixed metaphor: an orange “G” contorted into the chevron shape of a military rank insignia. Guerrilla insurgencies are often organized and sometimes even state-based, but they are hardly represented by the formal emblem of command and control military structure. Guerrilla warfare is irregular, asymmetrical, and lithe.… read more
A new multi-touch puzzle game for the iPad and iPhone is about form, not function—and it's about to become a status symbol.
Some media exists for you to “consume”: to read, to watch, to play. Even though a book, television show, or video game isn’t destroyed by this encounter like a cheesesteak or a firework might be, the creative work is meant to be made a part of ourselves. To transform us in some way. But other forms of media don’t aspire… read more