On startups and small businesses
A recent article asks whether apps are just a feature, or if they are a business. Should individual creators or very small teams try to make a decent living from an app (a “lifestyle business”) or should they raise venture capital and expand (a “startup”). The article cites Buffer, an app for scheduling tweets (sigh), as an example of a… read more
Some August miscellany
I’ve been busy dealing with administrative preparations for the start of the fall term, and finishing up a couple of summer projects. I have a bunch of blogmatter in the hopper, but in the meantime, here’s a few recent bits and pieces of mine that you can find elsewhere: I was on last week’s Playable Character podcast, talking about Cow… read more
On diversity in games. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Every now and then someone objects to game design methods by arguing against “historical aberrance.” This line of reasoning claims that a particular trend is undesirable on the grounds that it is new and abnormal, unshared by historical precedent. Let me share two examples. First, a few years ago Raph Koster invoked this argument about single-player games. As Koster put… read more
An easier way to make Atari games on your Mac
Download the TextMate Atari VCS Support Installer (Mac OS X 10.5+, 60k) Several years ago I was really getting heavily into Atari VCS programming—for teaching, for art, and for research on Racing the Beam. VCS programming is notoriously hard at first, but like anything once you get the hang of it, it feels natural. What never felt natural, however, was… read more
It’s interview season, apparently. I’ve done a number of interviews recently, and I figured it would be easier to link them all at once for my devoted readers enjoyment (that’s you). First, Laureano Ralon published oan interview with me on Figure/Ground Communications. The interview covers the state of scholarship and the academy, McLuhan, and game studies. Laureano has been conducted… read more
Lingis on Videogames
I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the passage in The Imperative in which Alphonso Lingis discusses videogames (albeit in brief): But although we use our automobile only to roll to one end of the city and back again, transportation evokes the existence of remote and enchanted destinations or the roar of the sun and the wind in… read more
Photos of the signed, numbered set of twenty-five
I started working on my Atari “game poems” project A Slow Year almost exactly three years ago. I had spent an idle summer afternoon writing 6502 assembly on the couch, and the first versions of the summer game took form. Slowly, over time, the work revealed itself to me: a set of four 1k games, one for each season, inspired… read more
The Fate of Cow Clicker
This is hard to explain. Something’s happening to Cow Clicker. Some months ago, evil bovine lords broke into Cow Clicker and started making demands. Their mysterious clues became the Cow ClickARG, which, Inception-like, sent up Alternate Reality Games from within the send-up of a Facebook game. Clues were scattered by the “bovine gods” around the globe, where “cowllective intelligence” helped… read more
Box and book preview
I’m spending this week and the start of next putting the final touches on the limited editions of A Slow Year. This involves a lot of trimming and glueing, as I’m attaching images and plaques to their final homes on books and boxes. It’s hard to explain how good it feels to trim and glue paper instead of writing emails… read more
New Versions of lost Video Soft Titles for Atari
In the description of my Amiga/Joyboard homage game Guru Meditation, I made the following statement: As far as I know there have been no games released for the joyboard since Mogul Maniac (not counting two unreleased Amiga prototypes from the early 80s), so Guru Meditation also reminds us of the long history of experimentation with physical controllers in the mainstream… read more