Search Results for games

The New Inquiry published a review by Michael Thomsen of my latest book How to Do Things With Videogames. It’s just the kind of review an author hopes for: fair, thoughtful, based on a thorough reading, and full of new ideas and observations. I’m grateful to Thomsen for writing it. Thomsen raises an objection that I’ve been waiting for and… read more

Tod Papageorge shared with me a talk Garry Winogrand gave at MIT in 1974, which he (Papageorge) introduced. An audio recording from the University of California Riverside’s archive captures much of the lively question and answer period, which included a wealth of fantastic material. Here are two of my favorites: A photograph has to be rational. It has to be… read more

Popular game enthusiast site Kotaku just published an article by my friend and game writer Leigh Alexander, about my last two games, Cow Clicker and A Slow Year. My good friend Frank Lantz makes several appearances. I guess I’m not going to say much more about the article, except that I hope you’ll go read it.

Lately I find myself talking a lot about contemporary “misuses” of computer media. That is, about trends that make partial use of the properties of such media, or that (in my view) mistake some less interesting, less promising, or less relevant set of properties as primary. For example: treating the microcomputer as a mere network appliance rather than as a… read more

Two seemingly unrelated things happened to me yesterday, which further reflection revealed to have surprising connections. First, I spoke on a panel at the Online News Association conference about games and news. Julia Schmalz (now of Bloomberg, formerly of USA Today) and Rajat Paharia (of gamification vendor Bunchball) were the other panelists. I presented my approach to newsgames and offered… read more

I’d previously shown you Leo Burnett Sydney CEO Todd Sampson advertising a popupar Australian TV show called The Gruen Transfer, about advertising techniques, while wearing a Cow Clicker t-shirt. Here’s a shot of Sampson on last week’s episode, in which he proudly dons the shirt. You can watch the whole episode online for another week or so. Tune in at… read more

While they’ve never said so in public, it seems Facebook has always been a silent fan of Cow Clicker. I’ve been tipped off about it several times, including via this shot of a Cow Clicker doodle on the whiteboard “wall” at Facebook HQ. A wider view of the wall cow included, later appeared in an issue of Wired. But given… read more

If we accept the premise that the humanities should orient toward the world and not toward a private, scholarly sanctuary, then what trends are already facilitating that process? One candidate is the “digital humanities,” a topic about which I have remained silent for too long, despite the fact that I direct a digital media graduate program and teach in a… read more

Yes, I know it’s probably just a reference to checking stock prices (a bull market), but I choose to interpret the cow as a reference to the promised “adventure games” or perhaps even “fantastic space games.” If you can read the text, you’ll also note that “videotex service” CompuServe offered a multichannel CB simulator. (thanks to Mark Sample for this… read more

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no… read more