My Atari VCS game earns Virtuoso, Vanguard awards
Last week and weekend I exhibited A Slow Year, my Atari VCS game poem project, at Indiecade. The show and the conference were fantastic, and it was a pleasure to meet new friends, see old ones, hear great talks, and see great games. I was particularly happy to meet Gaijin Games’s Alex Neuse, to finally get to play Chris Hecker’s… read more
My GDC Online Talk
Yesterday I gave my talk at GDC Online, about Cow Clicker. You can read Gamasutra’s recap of it, and you might also want to read Raph Koster’s thoughts. Next stop, Indiecade, where I’ll be showing A Slow Year.
About Medal of Honor and Afghanistan. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
In November, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments from the State of California, as the latter attempts to prohibit the sale of certain games to minors. The issue has remained a nail-biter for the industry and its advocates, who see the proposal as an attack on the First Amendment rights of game makers. Despite its importance to American life,… read more
Žižek on Videogames and Reality
Slavoj Žižek tends to make occasional offhand references to videogames. Here’s one from an interview in New Scientist from last month (read it here instead if you don’t have a subscription) And what is your take on reality? There is an old philosophical idea about God being stupid and crazy, not finishing his creation. The idea is that God (but… read more
Via my doctoral student (and Newsgames co-author) Simon Ferrari, this snippet from Lev Vygotsky’s classic text Mind in Society: A special feature of human perception—which arises at a very young age—is the perception of real objects. This is something for which there is no analogy in animal perception. By this term I mean that I do not see the world… read more
Stuff I said to the Press
I thought I’d share few recent mentions of me in the media. I try not to do this with every little mention, but all of these are really good articles that you should read anyway. First, Chris Suellentrop’s New York Times Magazine story Video Games that Bring Afghanistan Home. It’s a wide-ranging feature, and even though I only have one… read more
circa 1979
A few years ago dynamic difficulty adjustment for videogames became a hot topic, first in the research world and then in game design too, thanks to titles like Left 4 Dead. Design novelty and technical innovation, right? As usual, not really. Here’s the abstract of a patent filed 31 years ago by legendary toy maker Marvin Glass & Associates, for… read more
Alien Phenomenology and How to Do Things with Videogames
My goal this summer was to finish two books I’d been working on. By July I had some concerns, as writing wasn’t coming as easily as I’d hoped, and then I got overwhelmed by the unexpected stampede of cows. But I just completed the second manuscript, and I’ll admit I’m quite chuffed to have reached my goal. The first book… read more
Uhm, freeplay is the disruption of presence?
Finally! A way to connect the recent “Derrida Debates” to videogames! Behold Modernauts. It’s inspired by the well-received Nintendo DS puzzle game Scribblenauts, in which the player solved puzzles by typing in the names of objects, which would appear for use in the puzzle. To complete it, the player would have to reach the goal, a star. Modernauts works similarly,… read more
On the different sorts of satire
What is Cow Clicker? Is it a satire? Yes, but it’s more complicated than that: it’s also a real game that people can (and as it would seem, many thousands do) play “in earnest.” That’s caused a number of people to ask if it ought to be taken seriously as satire. We tend to throw around words like “satire” and… read more