From my Persuasive Games column at Gamasutra
From Humble Bundle to Steam Sales, from Indie Royale to Indie Gala, it seems like you can’t go online anymore without seeing a new “game bundle” offering — a set of unusual, overlooked, and independent game titles offered at a substantial discount for a limited time, often with a portion of proceeds donated to charities like the Red Cross or… read more
Thoughts on the material conditions of programming practice
I was corresponding yesterday with Jock Murphy, a Portland-based photographer, software engineer, and mobile game developer. Jock had read Racing the Beam, and we were talking about the relative differences between the 6502 and the Z80 microprocessors. This subject led us to different programming practices, a topic Nick and I discuss in RtB in relation to the Atari, but for… read more
Wired's online cow clicking game about Cow Clicker
As promised, I’m now linking the iPad and web versions of Wired‘s story on Cow Clicker. There are some interesting features of each. The iPad edition features clickable cows that moo, but the online version of the story really, uhm, sets the moood… it includes a complete Cow Clicker-themed cow clicking game with Facebook integration. So, go try that out.… read more
Brief thoughts on Steve Jobs's Resignation
Steve Jobs is a fascist. That’s what everyone loves about him: he tells us what he wants, and he convinces us we are going to like it. And we do, not because he’s right (despite popular opinion), but because it’s so rare to get such definitive, brazen, top-down, abusive treatment in this era of lowest-common-demoninator wishy-washiness. It doesn’t matter if… read more
A tiny rant
The following message appears on Amazon.com listings for which a Kindle edition appears not to be available. Some of the time, this means that a Kindle edition is not available. But most of the time it is a lie. Why? Because the process of publishing a Kindle edition involves submitting it to Amazon.com, which does the conversion and release process… read more
An easier way to make Atari games on your Mac
Download the TextMate Atari VCS Support Installer (Mac OS X 10.5+, 60k) Several years ago I was really getting heavily into Atari VCS programming—for teaching, for art, and for research on Racing the Beam. VCS programming is notoriously hard at first, but like anything once you get the hang of it, it feels natural. What never felt natural, however, was… read more
...and secure your fame and fortune forever*
Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested… read more
My talk at the 2011 Game Developers Conference "rant" panel
Last year I made a game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Among the many retorts to Cow Clicker‘s characterization of social games, a common one is about creativity. Players of these games, the argument goes, exercise imagination and creativity far beyond what… read more
A review of the book by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next is a book with a stark premise: historically, cities have developed and thrived around transportation technologies. The present age is that of the airplane, and cities will be built for and around them. What seaports were to the eighteenth century, railroads to the nineteenth, and highways to the twentieth, so airports will be to… read more
Are you investing in your calf's future?
By now, the virtues of cow clicking are well-known and understood. But there’s a problem: Cow Clicker is bound to Facebook, and to use Facebook one must be over the age of thirteen. Are our children meant to be cooped up indoors, never allowed to romp through pastures of their own? A startling truth reveals itself: despite the explosion in… read more