The Making of Obsession
I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here’s the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games,… read more
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
Updates on the Development and Release of A Slow Year
One of the lovely things about making a videogame called A Slow Year is that I can take as damn well long as I please to get it done. But that doesn’t mean I don’t owe an update to those of you who have been following the game. At the IGF in March, I had the opportunity to watch a… read more
Pragmatism and Realism
On Friday I was honored to participate in Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won’t, a conference in memory of Richard Rorty and in celebration of the opening of his collection of papers in the UC Irvine Critical Theory Archive. Particular attention was given to the “born digital” materials, which are offered in a unique “online reading room,” allowing researchers access… read more
Me and Harman on Giving Lectures
After an email conversation he and I had, Graham offers some thoughts on the best way to give talks. Here was my original off-the-cuff thought: One of the lessons Iâ??ve learned in the past five years is that there is no right way to give a talk. There are, however, right ways to give particular talks in particular circumstances. Unfortunately,… read more
Part 1: Why a Videogame?
A brief history. Back in the late summer of 2006, a few months after the publication of Unit Operations, I exchanged a few emails with Graham Harman, whose book Tool-Being I had cited in the early pages of mine. We talked about a few things, including Leibniz, Badiou, Heidegger, Meillassoux, D.W. Griffith, and McLuhan. Sometime in early 2007, over a… read more
The Unseen Power of Google's Malware Detection
I often worry about the consequences of what Siva Vaidhyanathan calls Googlization, the way Google is changing and disrupting the creation and dissemination of ideas. I’ve resisted using Google services like Gmail and Google Docs, despite their popularity and, in some cases, their convenience. I’ve mostly been disinterested in allowing Google to mine and profit from my information, but this… read more
On cognitive dissonance and the iPhone. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Last month I took an early Sunday morning flight from Atlanta to Orlando. I wandered into a newsstand and picked up the May 2009 issue of Popular Science, which featured a cover story about space planes that intrigued me. The story turned out to be less interesting than the cover suggested, but I rather enjoyed another article about the discomfort… 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