A review of the catalog that accompanies the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition
This review was published in The American Journal of Play 5:1 (Fall 2012). You can also download a PDF of the review provided by the journal. The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effectby Chris Melissinos and Patrick O’RourkeNew York: Welcome Books, 2012. Contents, images, credits. 215 pp. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 9781599621098 The Art of Video Games,… read more
What is Nintendo really attempting to do with the Wii U? From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
For a century and a quarter, Nintendo has devoted itself to an unspoken mission: making games safe, stripping them of their risk and indecency. The company started as a hanafuda playing card manufacturer in the late nineteeth century. Like most gambling, hanafuda was closely tied to organized crime, and the term yakuza, the Japanese word for an organized crime mafia,… read more
A whole book about a single line of code. By ten authors.
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.The authors of this collaboratively written book… read more
Get A Slow Year and Racing the Beam when you support this indie film about videogames in 1982 on Kickstarter
A few months ago Brett Neveu sent me a script for a movie he is producing, about a group of teenagers hoping to get an Atari VCS for Christmas 1982. The script is fun and charming, sitting somewhere just between Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There’s now a Kickstarter for the film, Christmas Bytes, meant to cover… read more
A new book in software studies
My next book is even stranger than my last. It’s an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book’s title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn’t strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.… read more
Jimmy Maher's Platform Study of the Commodore Amiga
I’m very happy to announce the publication of the latest book in the Platform Studies series, Jimmy Maher’s The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. It’s a terrific book about this influential multimedia microcomputer. As someone who never had an Amiga in the 80s and 90s, but who was often surrounded by them, I can vouch for the effectiveness of… read more
In the New Scientist "Big Ideas" column
Are everyday objects, such as apple pies or microchips, aliens? It depends how you think about what it’s like to be a thing. This essay appeared in the
or, A Slow Year at the Telfair
This week, the Telfair Museums will open Game Change: Videogames as Art Medium and Inspiration. My game A Slow Year is among the pieces that will be on exhibit from February 27 to April 1, 2012. I’ll be in Savannah Thursday evening for the Game Change panel, from 6-8pm at the Jepson Cetner. Other artists in the show include Kunal… 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
Video with talks by me, Jesse Fuchs, Sonny Rae Tempest
I had previously mentioned Innovative Leisure, a show of new games for Atari I curated at Babycastles. The opening took place almost two weeks ago, but due to travel and then the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s taken me this long to follow up. Thanks to Ida Benedetto, you can watch this great video of the opening. Some timecodes you may want… read more