The Atari Video Computer System
An accessible book about the Atari VCS as a platform. Co-authored with Nick Montfort. This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon Racing the Beam is a study of the most important early videogame console, the Atari Video Computer System (also known as the Atari VCS or the Atari 2600). Through its main example, the book… read more
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
Photography, Flickr, and Me
As regular readers may have noticed, I have an interest in photography. I’ve started a photography section on this website, where you can view some of the photographs I have taken. Right now I’ve added galleries for Objects, Places, and People, as well as a photo project I’m slowly working on called Street Portraits. Over the last year I’ve gone… read more
who misconstrues my work and that of my colleagues
(1) I’m not going to bother to write a thorough prose response to your recent Escapist article Quibus Lusoribus Bono? Who is Game Studies Good For?, but only numbered objections and comments. Readers, you’ll have to go read Travis’s article before any of these will make sense. (2) Your article is based on the premise that Douglas Wilson looks down… read more
Opinion piece published in The Guardian
There are a few common reasons why advertisers want to use videogames to reach consumers. One is the belief that videogames are a place to recover the waning audiences of television advertising. The highly desirable, seemingly elusive 18-34 male demographic is often, unfairly, assumed to correspond directly to videogame players. What better way to retrieve these “lost” consumers than to… 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
The future lasts forever
This spring I was awarded tenure at the Georgia Institute of Technology and leveled-up to Associate Professor in the School of Literature Communication and Culture. As I tried to think about an appropriate way to announce this accomplishment to my readers here, the phrase that kept entering my head was the one reproduced in the subtitle above: the future lasts… read more
Straight Outa Canada
This week I was in Canada, which is the country immediately north of America (“the States” for the rest of you). I like to read the newspapers delivered to my hotel room when traveling, so I inhaled today’s issue of the Globe and Mail, which is a national coverage paper in that country. Among the many things I learned about… 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
Reflections on scholarly writing on the web
Or more subtly: reading online isn’t the same as reading on paper, yet we continue to treat the web as a distribution tool rather than as a medium with its own material constraints, both suited and unsuited to certain kinds of content. I’ve been thinking about this recently after I started reading a lot more scholarly writing online. Let me… read more