The Politics of Play in Military Video Games
Routledge has just published Joystick Soldiers, a new book about military videogames edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne. I wrote the foreword for the book, so I suppose I have to admit that my recommendation comes partly on those grounds. Still, as I wrote in the foreword, the book “both embraces and resists the role of militarism… read more
More Good Blogs to Read
Two interesting blogs have come to my attention, and I thought I’d pass along the recommendation to read them. First, Nathan Gale’s An Uncanny Ontology. Gale recently wrote about zombies and ontology, which I talked about here yesterday. He’s also been working on an interesting theoretical frame for object-oriented thinking, an Object Cone. Second, Fabio Cunctator’s Hyper Tiling. The author’s… read more
Zombies and Ontology
Over at Un-canny Ontology, Nathan Gale writes a post that responds to and extends both mine on Harman’s conception of cuteness and Bryant’s on the unheimlich. The uncanny valley rears its head, a concept originally developed by Masahiro Mori about the moment when robots cease to seem realistic and begin to seem creepy. It’s an often-cited concept in videogames, and… read more
On shuttering Water Cooler Games
I’ve just closed Water Cooler Games, the blog about “videogames with an agenda” that Gonzalo Frasca and I started in 2003. I have also archived the site in its entirety here on Bogost.com, and all existing links to pages on watercoolergames.org will forward correctly in perpetuity. When Gonzalo and I first started Water Cooler Games, the very idea of “videogames… read more
Graham Harman and a Tiny Horse
Today John Sharp showed me this insanely cute dwarf miniature horse, named Koda. He’s about as big as a cat, so noticeably smaller than a normal miniature horse because he is, well, a dwarf. Click for a bigger image, or see more pics here. One of my favorite sidetrips in Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics (back in print soon) is his… read more
And why it's bad for digital media and game studies
Two key conferences in digital media and game studies, Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) and the Digital Games Reserch Association (DiGRA) use an unexpected format for their papers: ACM, the format devised by the Association for Computing Machinery for publications in computer science. I have nothing against computer science, but the use of ACM format is bad and dumb for… read more
Interview with Paul Ennis
Paul Ennis has been publishing interviews with a number of contemporary thinkers working in and around the area of speculative realism, on his website Another Heidegger Blog. So far, participants have included Lee Braver, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Adrian Ivakhiv, with Jeffrey Malpas to come this week. I was honored to be included among the group, and Ennis has just… read more
On games as drills for banal tasks. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
When we talk about the unique power of video games, we often cite their ability to engage us in thorny challenges, to envelop our attention and commitment, to overwhelm our senses and intellects as we strive to master physical trials of a battle or work out the optimal strategy for an economy. Usually we’re right when we think this, no… read more
Part 2: What Kind of Videogame?
In part 1 of this series, I introduced the idea of a metaphysics videogame and described why such a thing might be a good idea for philosophy. That was the easy part. In this post I’m going to explore what such a game might look like, in the abstract. The idea is not to suggest only the most viable approach,… read more
Like a high-speed film of a horse running
Graham Harman has been posting a series of enlightening thoughts on writing as he races toward a book deadline, taking only two months from start to finish. The book in question has a word limit (a character limit, really) because it is destined for immediate translation, and the translation has to be done on a budget. The whole series is… read more