A chapbook of game poems for Atari VCS, PC, and Mac
among the “Ten Most Anticipated Games of the Year” —Voxy “Excellent and completely out there.” —Wired “A Slow Year takes zen inspiration a step further, with four interactive haiku.” —Boing Boing Winner of the Virtuoso and Vanguard awards 2010 Indiecade Festival A Slow Year is a collection of four games, one for each season, about the experience of observing things.… read more
My Spring 2010 seminar
Some of you might be interested in this, the course description for my Spring 2010 graduate seminar/studio course, LCC 8823 Special Topics in Game Design and Analysis: The Atari Video Computer System: Hacks and Demakes In this intensive seminar, we will explore every aspect of the Atari VCS (2600), the most important early home videogame console. Based on a critical-technical… read more
Twitter and Subtlety
In June 2007, Ian McCarthy and I started performing Wandering Rocks on Twitter each Bloomsday. My original explanation of our project began with the phrase “I do not like Twitter.” I hadn’t realized it until today, but back in June (almost exactly two years after our first effort), my name appeared on a list of 100 Educators to Follow on… read more
Learning from the jazz pop instrumental
I seem to wind up in the car for at least part of the early afternoon every Saturday. As a result, I’ve developed a habit of listening to the reruns of America’s Top 40 with Casey Kasem that play on satellite radio channel 70s on 7. This week’s chart was from thirty years ago exactly, October 29, 1979. The number… read more
The miscellany of autumn
I’ve been a bit of a mess this week, as I’m finishing up the Newsgames book with my two graduate students and preparing my keynote for SLSA the week after next. Fortunately, interesting things have gone on without me. As I previously mentioned, on Monday, we hosted a colloquium on “how to think about narrative and interactivity,” featuring Espen Aarseth,… read more
Fun with Infringement
Almost a year ago, I wrote about my modest success selling t-shirt designs on Zazzle.com that artfully depict the Disney World monorail announcer’s characteristic Por favor manténgase alejado de las puertas. In that piece, I also drew attention to the ways products like this exert fandom by commercially exploiting holes in a property owner’s own productization of itself. What I… read more
New Yorker parodies the New York Times
This is already a month old, but I’m just seeing it now: the New Yorker ran a set of satirical New York Times videogame reviews, in response to the Seth Schiesel fawn over The Beatles: Rock Band (to which I responded strongly, in case you forgot). My favorites: A princess has been kidnapped. Her name is Zelda, she is beautiful,… read more
Or, my Dad read Logical Investigations and all I got was this lousy coffee mug
I realize the world is not entirely comprised of philosophy jokes, but sometimes it sure seems that way. I just came across this Personalized Name Gift – Husserl Mug on Amazon.com: Curious, but not chortle-inducing… until I read the product description: This is a brand new custom made coffee mug imprinted using the latest sublimation technology. This process embeds the… read more
So good for beautiful people
On last week’s episode of Mad Men (season 3, episode 4), the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency shot a TV spot for the then-new diet cola Patio. 1962-3 was the year of diet soda, with the introduction of RC Cola’s Diet Rite, Pepsi’s Patio and Coca Cola’s TaB. As often happens after the show, I found myself pondering old products… read more
Nolan Bushnell on Educational Videogames
I stumbled upon an article by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell about the educational potential of videogames. It’s not dated, but based on the biographical one-liner I’d say it’s from around 1982. Here’s the first paragraph: The computer, the single most powerful development of the twentieth century, is still puny in comparison to the mind of man. The difference lies in… read more