Two cows battle for supremacy, and you decide the victor
In celebration of Gamasutra naming Cow Clicker one of the top 5 cult games of 2010, a glorious new feature is born! Cowfight! Now two cow types can battle to supremacy. Each click counts as a vote, thus buying and clicking a cow marks a player’s support. Watch your cow rise to glory! The first cowfight is ripped from the… read more
A game to support of the Whitney's annual fund
Clickistan may be the craziest thing I’ve seen recently. It’s an abstract online art game by Ubermorgen.com, which is also and simultaneously a promotional game for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2010 annual fund. The Whitney commissioned Clickistan, which they describe like this: a work of computer game art that references early net art and classic coin-operated arcade games… read more
A Zero-Player Game
Can’t believe I missed this. Godville is a browser and iPhone game that bills itself as “zero-player,” because, well, play doesn’t require a player. Godville is a massively-multiplayer zero-player game (ZPG), playable in the browser. The gist of the Godville is a parody on everything from “typical” MMO games with their tedious level ups, to internet memes and ordinary day… read more
A book series, Ian Bogost & Nick Montfort, series editors
Platform Studies is a book series published by the MIT Press that invites authors to investigate the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems. Platforms have been around for decades, right under our video games and digital art. Those studying new media are now starting to dig down to… read more
Video of my Vienna Games Conference Keynote
Earlier this fall I gave a keynote at the Vienna Games Conference, aka Future and Reality of Gaming, or FROG. The video of the talk has now been posted, and you can watch it in its entirety. The talk tries to answer the question in the title… the gist of my response is that sports videogames are variants, not simulations.… read more
Please buy one!
I’m happy to announce that my award-winning game A Slow Year is now available for purchase. I often have the pleasure of announcing a new videogame I’ve made or book I’ve written. Today I get to do both for a single release, as A Slow Year is both a book and a videogame, the one packaged inside the other. The… read more
We are soon entering our 6th month online, and I want to take a moment to ask you for your help in continuing our mission. Cow Clicker is facing new challenges and encountering new opportunities and both are going to require major funds. Cow Clicker is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us… read more
Game Design, Newsgames, Objects, and Whitehead
I’m doing a whole crap-ton of things in Los Angeles the week after Thanksgiving. First I’ll be visiting Tracy Fullerton’s game design class at USC on Monday. Next I’ll be giving a talk on Newsgames at the USC Annenberg School, at noon on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, I’ll be participating in a one-day event at UCLA, HELLO EVERYTHING: Speculative Realism… read more
My Indiecade "Project Next" Talk
In addition to getting to exhibit (and collect two awards!) for A Slow Year at this year’s Indiecade festival, I was also invited to do a talk at the conference portion of the event, in a session called “Project Next.” Jon Blow, Chris Hecker, Alex Neuse, Paolo Pedercini and I all gave short talks about the new games we each… read more
Why physical movement games are incompatible with our homes
The Microsoft Kinect is available today, and with it come innumerable reviews of its successes and flaws (find a summary of them at Gamasutra). A common property of many negative reviews is the enormous amount of living room space Kinect requires, far more than most people will have in a sizable home let alone a modest apartment. I wrote about… read more