A roundtable at the LA Review of Books
On June 14-15, 2013, the LA Review of Books hosted a two-part roundtable on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). Participants included me, Cathy N. Davidson, Al Filreis, and Ray Schroeder. Below is my contribution to part two, which included responses to the statements in part one (which you can find here; this response won’t make much sense unless you read… read more
From a longer article forthcoming in The Gameful World
My short essay Gamification is Bullshit was a very widely read provocation, but it was never meant to be a complex argument. I’ve finally written a longer, more detailed version of that argument in an article titled “Why Gamification Is Bullshit.” It will appear in Steffen P. Walz and Sebastian Deterding’s forthcoming collection The Gameful World: Approaches, Issues, Applications, to… read more
A new multi-touch puzzle game for the iPad and iPhone is about form, not function—and it's about to become a status symbol.
Some media exists for you to “consume”: to read, to watch, to play. Even though a book, television show, or video game isn’t destroyed by this encounter like a cheesesteak or a firework might be, the creative work is meant to be made a part of ourselves. To transform us in some way. But other forms of media don’t aspire… read more
Would I be doing what I do now had I been subject to today's University of California graduate tuition and fees? Probably not.
My graduate school experience was unusual, at least for someone pursuing a humanities PhD. While I did teach some, for much of the time I was in grad school I was also working in the technology and entertainment industries. In part this is because I was an immovable ass who wasn’t willing to give up my interests in computing in… read more
An obscure title at the center of videogame copyright litigation is unearthed 30 years later.
One of the most important precedents in videogame intellectual property litigation is Atari, Inc. vs. Amusement World, Inc., a 1981 case that involved a game called Meteors by the defendant, which Atari claimed infringed on the copyright of its popular game Asteroids. Atari sought an injunction against Amusement World and its president, Stephen Holniker. You can read the entire decision… read more
An image taken with a Lytro camera is not really an image, but a machine capable of producing many possible renditions.
The Lytro Light Field Camera Let's think about photography as people live it. A posed family picture might be taken once, then again, and again until the right combination of open eyes, smiles, and light and shadow produce an acceptable portrait. An action, performance, or sports shot that could speed by too fast for human judgement partakes of a surrogate: the… read more
A review of the catalog that accompanies the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition
This review was published in The American Journal of Play 5:1 (Fall 2012). You can also download a PDF of the review provided by the journal. The Art of Video Games: From Pac-Man to Mass Effectby Chris Melissinos and Patrick O’RourkeNew York: Welcome Books, 2012. Contents, images, credits. 215 pp. $40.00 paper. ISBN: 9781599621098 The Art of Video Games,… read more
On cadence and deep design in the current social games environment. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
Imagine that you were a big game studio that had built your business around free-to-play social network games. Say that you had recently gone public, but your stock was down sixfold from its IPO price. And let’s also imagine that the social network facilitating most of your business was also taking a hammering on Wall Street. Imagine too that analysts… read more
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich.
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich. The Shuttle, its escort, and traffic (Reuters). I am a Space Shuttle child. I ogled big exploded view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I built models of it out of plastic and… read more
Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation
It’s hard to overestimate Alan Turing’s contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine’s signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In… read more