How Spent missed the mark
There’s a nice persuasive game making the rounds, called Spent. It was made by ad agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham. The game attempts to illustrate how easily financial hardship and low income work can devolve into homelessness. It does a pretty good job, too, taking the same basic method as did Tenure, the 1975 PLATO game about… read more
On substituting programming languages for natural languages in the humanities
Last year I learned about a rumor swirling around the comparative literature department at UCLA, where I did my PhD. Supposedly I had managed to get C++ to count as one of the three languages required for the degree. It’s not true, for the record, but it is a topic that comes up from time to time—substituting programming languages for… read more
Father of the first exercise videogame
Fitness expert Jack LaLanne died yesterday at age 96. He’s most notable for starting the first health clubs, but anyone who lived with television in the late twentieth century couldn’t have missed LaLanne’s many programs and endorsements. Despite his fame, and despite the recent popularity of home fitness videogames like Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, few know that LaLanne… read more
A review of Adam Kotsko's book
Adam Kotsko’s little book Awkwardness is a pleasurable and insightful read, yet another reminder that Zero Books is quickly becoming the trusted source for short, punchy works on philosophy and cultural theory. In the book, Kotsko offers a tiny theory of awkwardness: “The tension of awkwardness indicates that no social order is self-evident and no social order accounts for every… read more
Finding the Friction Point
There are many charming and lurid moments in Circus Philosophicus, Graham Harman’s short, new book of philosophical myths. But this is the passage I find my mind returning to, in which Graham explains why causation is buffered: A thing does not come from the void and strike us like a meteor. This model also reflects one of the many prejudices… 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
in Digital Media / Public Media
My program at Georgia Tech has yet another job opening, in the area of civic digital media. I hope you might apply for it, or share it with those who might be a good match. The School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology seeks applications from digital media theorist-practitioners with a Ph.D. (field open) to fill… 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
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
At the 2010 Society for Literature Science and the Arts Conference
Last week at the Society for Literature Science and the Arts conference, Katherine Behar organized two back-to-back panels on Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF). There were six papers total, and a response to each panel by Katherine Hayles and myself, respectively. To participants, Behar posed the question, “What would a program for Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF) entail?” The first panel attempted general responses,… read more