Words With Friends Forever

On cadence and deep design in the current social games environment. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra

Imagine that you were a big game studio that had built your business around free-to-play social network games. Say that you had recently gone public, but your stock was down sixfold from its IPO price. And let’s also imagine that the social network facilitating most of your business was also taking a hammering on Wall Street. Imagine too that analysts… read more

Pretty Hate Machines

A Review of Patrick Crogan's Gameplay Mode in Game Studies 12:1

If game scholars share any intellectual common ground, perhaps it is our tendency to stake claims regarding the scope of game studies. Games are their own cultural form, extending back for millennia, say some. Games are a kind of computational media, say others. Games are a social practice, say others still, or a formal structure, or a kind of storytelling,… 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

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

In Defense of Competition

On sport, games, success, and failure

On her blog, my Georgia Tech colleague Amy Bruckman writes about her dissatisfaction with this year’s Olympics. While she loved the games as a kid, Bruckman wonders if her new feelings of disappointment arise from watching them as an educator rather than as a little girl: “I look at young people and want to see positive outcomes for all our… read more

Academia Still Isn’t So Bad

On Terran Lane's "On Leaving Academia"

Over the last day or so, many of my Facebook friends have been posting UNM CS professor Terran Lane’s reflections on leaving academia for a job at Google. It’s worth a read, and raises some very valid points about the troubles with academia—pay, funding, job security, incentives, isolationism, work/life balance and so forth. But I also find the piece fairly… 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

Buying Hypothetical Products

Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment

Also: I expanded the ideas in this post into a short article for Fast Company, Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Platform Or Reality Show? The web is flipping out today over the OUYA, a hypothetical new videogame console posted today on Kickstarter. It promises “A New Kind of Video Game Console,” but it’s really just an Android device with yet another 30%-take uncurated… read more

Two Takes on Alien Phenomenology

From the Italian news and an online reading group

Today yields two humbling approaches to Alien Phenomenology. First, an article by Evan Selinger in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, L’anima delle cose (“the soul of things”). It’s in Italian, but I’m sure you can figure out how to read it somehow. Corriere della Sera is a very old and respected Italian daily, so it’s particularly nice to see… read more

Obamacare: the Videogame

On failures to communicate

There’s a great article by Monroe Anderson at The Root titled ‘Obamacare,’ the Video Game?. Anderson recalls asking Obama strategist David Axelrod “why so many voters were so clueless as to how President Obama had spent the first two years of his first term.” Axelrod’s response: “information gridlock.” Essentially, the White House hadn’t been able to communicate effectively with the… read more

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