Not Interdisciplinarity, But Love

My keynote presentation at the 2008 Game Developers Conference Education Summit

Note: this is a written version of the keynote address I gave at the Education Summit at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. The original presentation was extemporaneous and included evocative (rather than explanatory) slides. This version has been adapted from the presentation and the slides in a manner that will hopefully preserve the ideas fully while maintaining their original context:… read more

Reading Online Sucks

Reflections on scholarly writing on the web

Or more subtly: reading online isn’t the same as reading on paper, yet we continue to treat the web as a distribution tool rather than as a medium with its own material constraints, both suited and unsuited to certain kinds of content. I’ve been thinking about this recently after I started reading a lot more scholarly writing online. Let me… read more

A Professor’s Impressions of Facebook

Musings after several months of use, as I prepare to start the semester

This spring, I created an account on Facebook. I’m a web 2.0 cynic (and a cynic in general), so this surprised some of my friends and colleagues. But I was encouraged by so many of them, I wanted to give it a try. For example, Ian McCarthy just wanted an easier way to share pictures with me without having to… read more

Time for games to grow up

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

The Configurative Book

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

Bloomsday on Twitter

A performance of Wandering Rocks on Twitter, and a commentary on both. Created with Ian McCarthy.

I do not like Twitter, the micro-blogging service that allows users to send short (SMS-sized) text-based updates that are displayed publicly and shared with friends social-network style.

Why We Need More Boring Games

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.

Persuasive Games on Mobile Devices

In Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change, edited by B.J. Fogg and Dean Eckles

There are three ideas I want to share in this short piece on mobile persuasion through videogames. First, how do videogames express ideas? Without understanding how games can be expressive in a general sense, it is hard to understand how they might be persuasive. Second, how do videogames make arguments? Videogames are different from oral, textual, visual, or filmic media… read more

Experiencing Place in Los Santos and Vice City

In The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto, edited by Nathan Garrelts. Co-authored with Dan Klainbaum.

Read the entire article in print in The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto The Grand Theft Auto videogame series puts the player in large, semi-realistic urban environments. Despite their apparent credibility, these environments are not re-creations of real urban locales, but rather remixed, hybridized cities fashioned from popular cultureâ??s notions of real American cities. Locality, the sense of… read more