Plus yet another update on A Slow Year
My forthcoming game A Slow Year is on exhibit at a show curated by Lara Sánchez Coterón, Playful & Playable: Critica y Experimentacion con Videojuegos. It runs until September 15 at Sala Amarica, in Vitoria Gasteiz (in northern Spain). Here’s a description of the exhibition, which also includes work by Eastwood – Real Time Strategy Group, Anita Fontaine y Mike… read more
Thoughts on the RSA panel papers
I’ve now had a chance to read three of the four papers from the RSA Object Oriented Rhetoric panel. Jim Brown’s summary is quite accurate, and I also recommend Nate’s thoughts on the potential of OOR. Here I’ll offer an overview of my reading of the papers, followed my my own sense of what object-oriented rhetoric might look like, or… read more
Design Beyond the Object
In addition to our new book Newsgames, the Fall 2010 MIT Press catalog (PDF) includes a wonderful new title called NONOBJECT, by designer Branko LukiÄ? (frog design, IDEO) and writer Barry M. Katz (California College of Design). I paste the press’s blurb below in its entirety, it’s so lurid and wonderful. The “objective” world is one of facts, data, and… read more
Software grows like new leaves
Thanks to Jan Holmevik, Cynthia Haynes for hosting me and Greg Ulmer at Clemson University last week. The occasion was a seminar and symposium on games and rhetoric, organized thanks to Victor Vitanza and his Pre/Text journal. I enjoyed lively conversation with students and faculty alike. Somehow it was the first time I’d met Ulmer, who gave a thought-provoking talk… read more
Thoughts on the Object-Oriented Empiricist
Via Bryant, I just discovered the blog Struggles with Philosophy. I’m not sure who the author is, but as Levi points out, discussion there has recently taken up Object-Oriented Ontology. Here’s an excerpt from the latest salvo. At one level I want to differentiate between the theory (or philosophy) of OOP and the praxis of OOP, which will be designated… read more
On the White House and Videogames
In a large theater at the 2010 Game Developers Conference, ten thousand game makers gathered for the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice awards ceremonies, where the best indie and mainstream games of the year are celebrated by and for their creators. In between the two, an unusual video was shown. Aneesh Chopra, the United States’s first Chief Technology… read more
My GDC 2010 Microtalk
What follows is my short talk from the microtalks session at last week’s Game Developers Conference. The format was a modified pecha kucha, with 20 slides advancing automatically every 16 seconds. The theme provided by organizer Rich Lemarchand was simply, “Play with Us.” I chose to explore the relationship between developers and their audiences. This is a very famous… read more
On the achievementalization of the world. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
In a widely disseminated talk at DICE last month, Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center professor Jesse Schell made a provocation: can game-like external rewards make people lead better lives? To answer the question, Schell explored hypothetical scenarios that might combine awards of XBox Achievements-like scrip with emerging sensor networks that would track our everyday behaviors. Teeth brushing might earn… read more
Learning about Learning Programming from the Apple ][
Among the many, many things we talk about when we discuss curriculum for the Computational Media degree is how to make learning programming facile and appealing all throughout a student’s career. Many sub-problems arise, for example, how can one help students learn new languages and environments after they’ve become familiar with one or two? Just after having some of these… read more
...but it's not necessarily informative
My next book, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (co-authored with my graduate students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), is being prepared for publication, and it should hit the streets in late summer of this year. In anticipation, I’ll try to offer some occasional previews of the content we cover in the book. One of the chapters in Newsgames covers infographics, exploring… read more