Recent Interviews

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

Social games? Boeh!

Cow Clicker in Het Parool

The Dutch newspaper Het Parool ran a story last Saturday about Cow Clicker. You can read a scan of the story below (in Dutch, click for the large version), but equally interesting to me is the fact that the paper put an enormous Cow Clicker cow on the front page of their media section (also below), just like Svenska Dagbladet… read more

Write a Platform Studies Book

...and secure your fame and fortune forever*

Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested… read more

Writing Books People Want to Read

Or, How to Stake Vampire Publishing

Alex Reid wrote an excellent rejoinder against academic book publishing last week. The post was inspired by a discussion at the recent Computers and Writing conference about traditional publishing versus blogging and other forms of digital publishing. It’s an old, perhaps even a boring topic at this point, so Alex turns the subject back on itself: most scholarly monograph book… read more

What do Videogames do to Art?

A response to the NEA frenzy

Last week the National Endowment for the Arts announced their new call for proposals in an “Arts in Media” category. This category, in the NEA’s words, “seeks to make the excellence and diversity of the arts widely available to the American public through the national distribution of innovative media projects about the arts and media projects that can be considered… read more

Newsgames Embrace Hard Complexity, not Easy Fun

A response to Paul Carr and Chris O'Brien

Cross-posted from PBS Idea Lab Earlier this month a group of journalists, game designers, and academics gathered at the University of Minnesota for a workshop on newsgames. I was there, as was fellow Knight News Challenge winner and San Jose Mercury News tech business writer Chris O’Brien. After the event, Chris wrote a a recap of the meeting. In turn,… read more

Looking Busy

Newsgames and the Paralysis of Media

I’m at the University of Minnesota this weekend, where Nora Paul has organized a workshop on Newsgames. It’s an excellent group, comprised of equal parts journalists, game developers, and academics. On the flight over, I read Ivor Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia. It’s about the precarious nature of work in the contemporary world, but I happened across a fantastically wry and apt… read more

Aerotropolis

A review of the book by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next is a book with a stark premise: historically, cities have developed and thrived around transportation technologies. The present age is that of the airplane, and cities will be built for and around them. What seaports were to the eighteenth century, railroads to the nineteenth, and highways to the twentieth, so airports will be to… read more

Beyond Blogs

How do scholars want to read and write?

There’s been a flurry of discussion in the speculative realism corner of the blogosphere over the last week about the nature of blogging as an academic pursuit. There are more posts than I can link or summarize (a point to which I’ll return), but for now, you can read Adam Robbert, Levi Bryant, Tim Morton, and Graham Harman on the… read more

The Cleanup Quotient

On the pleasures and pains of home dining

When dining out, there are a number of criteria by which to judge one’s meal. The quality of the food, of course, and its presentation, and the service, and the ambience for certain. Perhaps the value of the experience relative to expectations, and so forth. But the stakes are different when eating at home, since one has to make the… read more