Things people do with videogames
Think of all the things you can do with a photograph. You can document the atrocities of war, as photojournalists sometimes do. You can record fleeting moments in time, as did documentarians like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. You can capture the ordinary moments of family life, as many people do at birthday parties or holidays for an album or… read more
Ten principles for better academic career advisement
Jason Mittell, a media studies scholar at Middlebury College, recently wrote about his experience being a researcher at a liberal arts college. Mittell’s offering points to and comments upon a related article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kristen Ghodsee, who explained her path from UC Berkeley graduate student to Bowdoin professor. Both Ghodsee and Mittell question the assumption… read more
My keynote presentation at the 2008 Game Developers Conference Education Summit
Note: this is a written version of the keynote address I gave at the Education Summit at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. The original presentation was extemporaneous and included evocative (rather than explanatory) slides. This version has been adapted from the presentation and the slides in a manner that will hopefully preserve the ideas fully while maintaining their original context:… read more
Introduction to a symposium I organized at Georgia Tech
This past Monday the School of Literature Communication and Culture and the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech hosted a symposium I organized called Dwelling Machines. Here’s the description, too small to read in the event poster above. This symposium asks whether and how technology might alter the way we perceive dwelling. Of particular interest are the aspects… read more
In order to mature properly, videogaming not only needs a Citizen Kane moment; it needs a little humdrum too
Think of any media form – say writing, photography or film. Now think of all of the things you can imagine doing with it. I like to think of this as the “possibility space” – a spectrum running between so-called high art at one end, to tools at the other. High art doesn’t have to be hoity-toity snobbery, and it… read more
On playing the roles of the weak in videogames. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
One of the unique properties of video games is their ability to put us in someone elseâ??s shoes. But most of the time, those shoes are bigger than our own. When we play video games, we are like children clopping around in their parentâ??s loafers or pumps, imagining what it would be like to see over the kitchen counter. As… read more
In The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto, edited by Nathan Garrelts. Co-authored with Dan Klainbaum.
Read the entire article in print in The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto The Grand Theft Auto videogame series puts the player in large, semi-realistic urban environments. Despite their apparent credibility, these environments are not re-creations of real urban locales, but rather remixed, hybridized cities fashioned from popular cultureâ??s notions of real American cities. Locality, the sense of… read more