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. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 9781599621098 The Art of Video Games,… read more
Reviews, Links, Code, and Discussion
Some links to discussion about 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. One of the common ways to interact with the idea seems to be writing and posting re-implementations of the program in other languages and environments. Geeta Dayal’s review of the book in Slate. Discussion on Reddit r/Programming, including a hilarious Enterprise Java version. A discussion at Stack Overflow stemming… read more
You Can't Buy A Better Book About a One-Line BASIC Program At Twice The Price
My latest book is out! It’s called 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 and it’s about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program. I wrote it with nine other authors, but it’s not an anthology; we write in a single voice collaboratively, producing a monograph-like text. You can buy it in a beautiful hardcover edition, designed by one of the authors,… 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
On MOOCs and Openness
In his keynote at the recent Educase conference, Internet zealot Clay Shirky made the case that MOOCs are not provocative because they are massive, but because they are open—except they are not really that open. So, I’m no big fan of Shirky’s fanatical obsession with Internet openness, but he’s right in this case. Still, it’s worth pointing out that there’s… read more
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich.
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich. The Shuttle, its escort, and traffic (Reuters). I am a Space Shuttle child. I ogled big exploded view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I built models of it out of plastic and… read more
The facile scourge of paid speaking
Writing for Esquire, Stephen Marche writes about The real problem with Niall Ferguson’s letter to the 1%, which amounts to “paid speaking gigs.” Here’s the money quote: Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of… read more
On massiveness, students, and flipped classrooms
The annual Computing Research Association conference is taking place this week at Snowbird in Utah, and one of today’s plenaries is about online eduction and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Reading the description of the session, I noticed two common positions on MOOCs that I think are rhetorically effective yet misleading. The “massive” numbers of “students” Citing enormous enrollment numbers… read more
Reflections on Twittering Rocks
In 2007, Ian McCarthy and I launched Twittering Rocks, a live performance of the central “Wandering Rocks” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which we executed every Bloomsday (that’s today, June 16) from 2007 through 2011. Last year, due to a change in the Twitter API (the move to OAuth, which requires that all users authorize applications rather than applications passing… read more