Like a high-speed film of a horse running
Graham Harman has been posting a series of enlightening thoughts on writing as he races toward a book deadline, taking only two months from start to finish. The book in question has a word limit (a character limit, really) because it is destined for immediate translation, and the translation has to be done on a budget. The whole series is… 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
"Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are... just friendly?"
There are lots of unusual plush toys and fancy resin dolls these days. Far more than there once were. First they were made for humor’s sake — the Albert Einstein and Shakespeare action figures. Then for education’s sake — the Presidents of the United States action figures. But now merchandising has become a parody of itself. There’s no need for… read more
On an artistic style in contemporary videogames. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Are games art? Last year, what Jim Preston wrote drove the nail into the coffin of this absurd and useless question: To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards. Americans’ attitude towards art is profoundly divided, disjointed and confused; and my message to gamers is to simply ignore the… read more
Fandom and Detritus
One of my gripes with Henry Jenkins’s book Convergence Culture was its tendency to privilege pop cultural fan activity to other sorts of attention. Appealing though they may be, I wondered if Harry Potter and Survivor really sat at the pinnacle of human creativity in the way that the book implied. One of the problems that concerned me was the… read more
IGI Global and Other Vampire Presses
For those of you who have become cynical in the face of academic publishing, an enterprise sometimes accused of supporting itself in spite of rather than in support of the ideas contained in the books that are its product, I share with you the following email I received from IGI Global: Subject: Forthcoming Copyright Years – Invitations to Publish Dear… read more
How games can be informal and personal. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
In the late 19th century, photographs were primarily made on huge plate-film cameras with bellows and expensive hand-ground lenses. Their operation was nontrivial, and required professional expertise. The relative youth of photography as a medium made that expertise much more scarce than it is today. All that changed when Kodak introduced the Brownie Camera in 1900. The Brownie was different.… read more
An art game for EA's Sims Carnival
A number of websites attempted to capitalize on the user-generated content craze of the late 2000s, but for games instead of text, images, or video. In 2008, Electronic Arts’ Sims division released their go at a community site where users can upload and play games, Sims Carnival. Unlike some of its competitors, Sims Carnival offers three different ways to create… read more
Why athletic excellence alone cannot be appreciated
My sister-in-law Susannah is a world-class gymnast. Despite the fact that her event, tumbling, is much, much more atheletic and arresting than plain old artistic gymnastics, it didn’t make the cut even for exhibition at the Beijing games. That may have something to do with China’s weak performance in the sport. In any case, she didn’t get to go this year.… read more
Things people do with videogames
Think of all the things you can do with a photograph. You can document the atrocities of war, as photojournalists sometimes do. You can record fleeting moments in time, as did documentarians like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. You can capture the ordinary moments of family life, as many people do at birthday parties or holidays for an album or… read more