“Hundreds” Is the Haute Couture of Video Games

A new multi-touch puzzle game for the iPad and iPhone is about form, not function—and it's about to become a status symbol.

Some media exists for you to “consume”: to read, to watch, to play. Even though a book, television show, or video game isn’t destroyed by this encounter like a cheesesteak or a firework might be, the creative work is meant to be made a part of ourselves. To transform us in some way. But other forms of media don’t aspire… read more

A Machine That Makes Cameras: The Aesthetics of the Lytro

An image taken with a Lytro camera is not really an image, but a machine capable of producing many possible renditions.

The Lytro Light Field Camera Let's think about photography as people live it. A posed family picture might be taken once, then again, and again until the right combination of open eyes, smiles, and light and shadow produce an acceptable portrait. An action, performance, or sports shot that could speed by too fast for human judgement partakes of a surrogate: the… read more

Media Studies at Georgia Tech

Some changes in my role and new initiatives

As my college just announced yesterday, I’ll be taking on a slightly different role at Georgia Tech. You can read the full release, but the relevant bits are as follows: I have been named Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies I am also now jointly appointed in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing I… read more

Real Networks Don’t Have Leaders

September 11 and Distributed Networks

On September 11, 2001 I was supposed to meet with Rick Harshman, an Akamai account executive, in my Los Angeles office. I only remember Rick’s name eleven years later because it kept staring at me from my Outlook calendar that morning suggesting an alternate timeline. I can’t remember why we were going to meet; I was working at a design… read more

Christmas Bytes

Get A Slow Year and Racing the Beam when you support this indie film about videogames in 1982 on Kickstarter

A few months ago Brett Neveu sent me a script for a movie he is producing, about a group of teenagers hoping to get an Atari VCS for Christmas 1982. The script is fun and charming, sitting somewhere just between Dazed and Confused and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. There’s now a Kickstarter for the film, Christmas Bytes, meant to cover… read more

Get Well, Galen

A lesson in fiction and reality

My kids just delivered some hand-made get-well cards. I was instructed to deliver them to Galen, the main character in the Wizard 3000 videogame series, a series of my kids’ invention which is not only fictional but fictionally fictional. Pop culture being what it is, Hollywood has started to make films based on the Wizard 3000 (fictionally speaking, that is).… read more

Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Platform Or Reality Show?

It's QVC for the web generation, the new Thunderdome, Off Track Betting for ideas addicts. Whatever you call it, Kickstarter's becoming less about funding widgets than pouring gas on creative sparks just to watch them ignite.

You’ve probably heard about the latest Kickstarter darling, OUYA: “a new kind of video game console” that connects to your HDTV like an XBox but allows anyone to publish games like the Android Marketplace. The company behind the device raised their $1 million target in eight hours, and have reached $5 million with more than three weeks left in their… read more

The Great Pretender

Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation

It’s hard to overestimate Alan Turing’s contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine’s signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In… read more

Time, Relation, Ethics, Experience

Some responses to the Alien Phenomenology reading group

Following the discussion of chapter 1, Darius Kazemi has posted discussion notes for chapters 2 and 3 of Alien Phenomenology—Ontography and Metaphorism, respectively. I thought I’d make a few comments on the topics discussed there. Time Time is discussed as a particularly mind-bending topic in OOO. AP doesn’t offer a theory of time; the conversation chez Darius is about meanwhile… read more

Process Intensity and Social Experimentation

On the surprising design features of Johan Sebastian Joust. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

In 1987, game designer Chris Crawford introduced the concept of process intensity, “the degree to which a program emphasizes processes instead of data.” Process, Crawford explains, involves “algorithms, equations, and branches,” while data refers to “tables, images, sounds, and texts.” A process-intensive program “spends a lot of time crunching numbers; a data-intensive program spends a lot of time moving bytes… read more

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