A clip of my segment and some responses to common questions from friends and colleagues
I appeared as a guest on The Colbert Report on Tuesday August 7. A lot of my friends and colleagues have been asking the same questions, so I thought I’d try to cover them all in one place. First, if you haven’t seen the interview, I’ve embedded it below. It runs about five minutes or so. This clip doesn’t include… 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
A response to Justin Peters' recent Slate article. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
Every week at my company Persuasive Games we get repeated calls and emails from people interested in playing Stone City, the Cold Stone Creamery training game we created back in 2005. In the game, the player services customers at the popular mix-your-own flavor ice cream franchise by assembling the proper concoctions while allocating generally profitable portion sizes. The vast majority… read more
Reflections on making books that work more like software
What I have in mind is not much different from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a configurative sonnet of 1014 possible configurations. Queneau’s composition is a bit too configurative for my purposes, but the principle is instructive. What if we could take core principles of an argument like the one I make in Unit Operations and offer different… read more
The openness of web applications demonstrates the real treachery of the iPhone's closed platform
This is the first in a series of short editorials on the iPhone, which I’ll be writing occasionally. Now that the geekqueues of iDay have come and gone, perhaps we can start talking more seriously about the device without all the fanboy ardor. For some of us who have not (yet) adopted the iPhone, one major disappointment is its status… read more
Persuasive Games, my book about games and rhetoric, is now available.
My new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, is out and shipping from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller. The book is about how videogames make arguments. I offer a theory of rhetoric for games, then I discuss a great many examples from commercial and non-commercial games, focusing on the areas of politics, advertising and learning. The book should… read more
The Expressive Power of Videogames
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon A book about how videogames make arguments: rhetoric, computing, politics, advertising, learning. Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis,… read more
Who I am and what I do, in fewer words
Looking for a bio (long, short)?Looking for photos of me?Want my curriculum vitae?Trying to contact me? Ian Bogost is an author and game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. In addition, Bogost… read more
Who I am and what I do
Looking for a bio (long, short)?Looking for photos of me?Want my curriculum vitae?Trying to contact me? Dr. Ian Bogost is an award-winning author and game designer whose work focuses on videogames and computational media. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an… read more
About making games ordinary. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Fashion mogul Marc Eckoâ??s eponymous clothing company now brings in $1 billion a year in revenue. Recently, Ecko has branched out from rhino-emblazoned t-shirts, shoes, and underpants to popular media, including the consumer culture rag Complex Magazine, the extreme lifestyle YouTube knock-off eckotv.com, and the 2006 video game Mark Eckoâ??s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.