I'm sure you've been biting your nails in anticipation
A week ago or so, I mentioned a trivia contest I was running on the Touch Arcade forums, with correct answers winning Guru Meditation redemption codes or a signed copy of Racing the Beam. I’ve given away all the codes and the book, so now it’s time to share the correct answers. (1) The Fairchild Channel F, an interchangeable cartridge… read more
In Digital Culture & Education
Thomas Apperley has written a new review of Racing the Beam in the new open-access peer-reviewed journal Digital Culture & Education. Nick and I are delighted to see a review of our book in the inaugural issue. I was likely delighted to see Apperley trace the steps toward the platform studies project in my earlier writings: The gestures towards a… read more
Win copies of Guru Meditation, Racing the Beam
The nice folks over at Touch Arcade invited me to drop in and discuss my game Guru Meditation on their forum. To spur conversation, I decided to run a little trivia contest. I figured I’d point the rest of you to it. Here’s how it works: the first person to correctly answer any single question gets an iTunes redemption code… read more
A medititation game for Atari VCS and iPhone
Guru Meditation is my attempt to create a legitimate zen meditation game. It is also partly (perhaps largely) a reimagining of and homage to the Amiga lore, and for that reason I wrote it in 6502 assembly for the Atari VCS, so that it could be played with a joyboard, an unusual “joystick for the feet” manufactured by Amiga in… 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
CRT Emulation for the Atari VCS
One of the main themes of Racing the Beam is the strong affinity between the Atari VCS and the CRT television. The system was designed around the TV and it interfaces with that display in an unusual and specific way. In today’s world of huge, sharp LCD monitors, it’s hard to remember what a videogame image looked like on an… read more
On "Bushnell's Law" and why it is misunderstood. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
Here’s a game design aphorism you’ve surely heard before: a game, so it goes, ought to be “easy to learn and hard to master.” This axiom is so frequently repeated because it purports to hold the key to a powerful outcome: an addicting game, one people want to play over and over again once they’ve started, and in which starting… read more
Where to find me this week
It’s time again for the Game Developers Conference. Here’s my speaking schedule for those of you who might be interested. Serious Games Summit. Monday-Tuesday, all day, Room 3007, Moscone West. I co-organized the summit with Ben Sawyer, which means you can blame us if the content isn’t to your liking. Where Were the Election Games?, Monday, 2:10p-3:10p, Room 3007, Moscone… 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
(or, Buy My New Book)
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System has been published and is now shipping from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller. The book, which I wrote in collaboration with Nick Montfort, is about the relationship between the hardware design of the Atari VCS, some of the games that were created for it, and those games’ influence on later titles and… read more