On shuttering Water Cooler Games
I’ve just closed Water Cooler Games, the blog about “videogames with an agenda” that Gonzalo Frasca and I started in 2003. I have also archived the site in its entirety here on Bogost.com, and all existing links to pages on watercoolergames.org will forward correctly in perpetuity. When Gonzalo and I first started Water Cooler Games, the very idea of “videogames… read more
Videogames with an Agenda - website archive
From 2003-2009, Water Cooler Games served as the web’s primary forum for “videogames with an agenda” — coverage of the uses of video games in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment. The site was maintained at watercoolergames.org, where it was edited by myself and Gonzalo Frasca from 2003-2006, and by me alone from 2006-2009.… read more
Thoughts on Skype and Ebay
If you follow technology news—or even if you don’t—you couldn’t have missed this incredible story about Skype. Apparently when Ebay bought Skype for $2.6 billion back in 2005, they didn’t acquire all of the latter’s core product. Specifically, Skype’s founders sheltered key peer to peer subsystems for the service in another company, Joltid, which has been licensing the technology to… read more
The Unseen Power of Google's Malware Detection
I often worry about the consequences of what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls Googlization, the way Google is changing and disrupting the creation and dissemination of ideas. I’ve resisted using Google services like Gmail and Google Docs, despite their popularity and, in some cases, their convenience. I’ve mostly been disinterested in allowing Google to mine and profit from my information, but this… read more
This week has witnessed much talk about Amazon’s possible release of a new, larger Kindle eReader designed for newspapers and textbooks, culminating in an article in the New York Times that claims confirmation of such an impending announcement. That’s on top of talk from magazine publisher Hearst’s announcement that it intends to produce its own reader, not to mention the… read more
You'd be completely shocked at the things we can convince people do with a vacuum cleaner.
Game trade news site Gamasutra ran a contest late last month to predict the future of games. Dubbed “Games of 2020,” the contest asked entrants to “imagine what video games might be like in the year 2020.” Winners would receive an all-access pass to the forthcoming Game Developers Conference. The results are in, among them a massively multiplayer origami game 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
IGI Global and Other Vampire Presses
For those of you who have become cynical in the face of academic publishing, an enterprise sometimes accused of supporting itself in spite of rather than in support of the ideas contained in the books that are its product, I share with you the following email I received from IGI Global: Subject: Forthcoming Copyright Years – Invitations to Publish Dear… read more
A Review of the Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer
For years now, it has been necessary to remove laptops from carry-on bags for inspection at airport security here in the States. The TSA imposes this requirement to insure a clear view of the internal components of some electronics. Scanning a laptop separately allows security personnel to insure that a laptop not an improvised electronic device, a process made more… read more
From this year's Fiscal Fright jack-o-lantern series
Jack-o-lanterns are serious business in my house. Yet, I knew it was going to be hard to top last year’s excellent Jack McCoy-o-Lantern. A political theme was possible, but it’s been done, and I’m hardly the kind to print a template from a website. So, we settled on a different theme: Fiscal Fright! Because honestly, what’s more terrifying than the… read more