Centuries hence, a citizen reads up on a bygone industry.
I squinted at the discolored reading pad I’d borrowed from the archives. The material was as dry as the title—“Taxonomy of Extinct Terrestrial Tribes”—but these ancient practices had long fascinated me. Take “games,” for example. They were played by adults and children alike, without shame—even in public! I had once scoffed at the idea that beings of my genetic lineage… read more
Why playing stupid games staves off existential despair
Games are grotesque. I’m not talking about games like Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt, games whose subjects are moral turpitude, games that that ask players to murder, maim, or destroy. I mean games in general, the form we call “games.” Games are gross, revolting heaps of arbitrary anguish. Games are encounters with squalor. You don’t play a game to experience an… read more
How media prepares us for havoc, even catastrophe
Maura Neill was stranded for eight hours in the gridlocked, apocalyptic aftermath of a modest snowstorm that crippled Atlanta this week. “It was like a scene from The Walking Dead,” she told USA Today, a reference to the comic-book-made-television-show-made-video-game set in northern Georgia, in which a zombie apocalypse overtakes, as far as we know, the world. The sentiment was repeated… read more
Dr. Ian Bogost is an author and an award-winning game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds appointments in the School of Architecture and the Scheller College of Business. Bogost is also Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC, an independent game… read more
DRM free for Windows and Mac. Get it at the Humble Store or via Storybundle.
In 2010 I released a game called A Slow Year. It was a strange game on many levels: made for the Atari VCS, and dubbed “game poems,” and composed as a kind of chapbook. The game was a finalist in the Nuovo category at the 2010 Independent Game Festival, and it won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at Indiecade 2010.… read more
Gone Home: a videogame about releasing secrets
Originally published at the Los Angeles Review of Books Gone Home is a videogame about releasing secrets, the kind of secrets that you should have known all along. It is set in Oregon circa 1995, and it tells the story of an ordinary family. As the game starts, you find yourself on the porch of an old house. You are… read more
My full response to Eric Zimmerman
The game designer Eric Zimmerman just published a “Manifesto for the Ludic Century,” and several folks were invited to write responses to it, including me. You should click through and read both of those links because this post won’t make any sense if you don’t. When you do, you’ll notice that Heather Chaplin commented “I don’t know exactly what he’s… read more
Animal Crossing's Strange, Unresolved Conflict. Excerpted from Persuasive Games.
While some are learning about the peculiar pleasure of Animal Crossing thanks to the series’ latest release on Nintendo 3DS, the game has long charmed and puzzled players and critics. In recognition of this fact, in September 2013 Gamasutra re-published the excerpt below, from my 2007 book Persuasive Games. In the section presented here, I discuss Animal Crossing‘s first edition… read more
On Darius Kazemi's "Fuck Videogames"
Darius Kazemi has published a fiery talk he delivered at Boston Indies entitled Fuck Videogames. Click over and give it a read (it’s quick) and then come back to read the rest. I see three main points in Darius’s argument: It’s not necessarily more “noble” or whatever to express something in videogame form, particularly if it’s not working for you.… read more
From a longer article forthcoming in The Gameful World
My short essay Gamification is Bullshit was a very widely read provocation, but it was never meant to be a complex argument. I’ve finally written a longer, more detailed version of that argument in an article titled “Why Gamification Is Bullshit.” It will appear in Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding’s forthcoming collection The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, to… read more