My plenary address at the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo
The following is the plenary address I gave today at the first SIEGE conference here in Atlanta on October 6, 2007. The title of the session was â??Games: Can They Be Important?â? My fellow plenary speakers were Ernest Adams and Daniel Greenberg. Today it is possible to work though an entire undergraduate and graduate education in videogames. Whether thatâ??s… read more
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
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
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
A review of media studies scholar Henry Jenkins's recent book
I read Henry Jenkins’s new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the… read more
An Approach to Videogame Criticism
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon A book about comparative videogame criticism: games, philosophy, literature, and art. In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests… read more
An exhibition of political games
In Fall 2004, Gonzalo Frasca and I curated an exhibition of political games called Videogames with an Agenda. The exhibition marked the UK opening of the documentary film The Corporation. The show ran from October 16 to November 7, 2004 at the exhibition space in the Curzon Soho, a theater in London’s Soho district. Featured games included work from Molleindustria,… read more