Search Results for music

You can now preorder my new book, How To Do Things With Videogames. It’s a shortish book, about videogames as a medium. The book includes new essays as well as new versions of earlier essays, bookended by a bit-sized theoretical argument about games as a medium. Here’s the blurb, followed by the book cover (which isn’t yet up on Amazon): In… read more

As someone who has worked on simulated television effects for Atari games, I was happy to learn about Cathode, a “vintage terminal emulator” for Mac. It simulates phosphor burn, screen curvature, glare, refresh rates, beam desyncrhonization, jitter, and other effects common to mini-computer terminals of yore. It’s a functioning terminal program, so you can run any of your favorite UNIX… read more

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the past year. It may sound silly given the ubiquity of the word, but despite all the “apps” on our phones and webpages and other devices, I’m not sure we have a good sense of what it means, or what that meaning implies. I was happy to fall upon this nice explanation… read more

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

You may have heard that Electronic Arts is considering opening a large studio in Georgia, either in Atlanta or Savannah. Many of us in the area had heard rumblings about this, but the Atlanta Business Chronicle filed the first official story on the matter late last week. Georgia has offered tax incentives for film production for many years, and a… read more

I seem to wind up in the car for at least part of the early afternoon every Saturday. As a result, I’ve developed a habit of listening to the reruns of America’s Top 40 with Casey Kasem that play on satellite radio channel 70s on 7. This week’s chart was from thirty years ago exactly, October 29, 1979. The number… read more

A relatively new service called Kickstarter, which describes itself as a funding platform for artists. Writers, filmmakers, musicians, and other creators can post projects to the site with attached budgets, which visitors can fund via pledges. If the budget is met within the specified time, the project gets funded. Otherwise, all funds are returned to the patrons, like a challenge… read more

I recently read Paul Lockhart’s incredible essay “A Mathematician’s Lament” [PDF]. Lockhart, a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, wrote the piece in 2002, but it wasn’t published until last year, on Keith Devlin’s monthly column. “A Mathematician’s Lament” begins with the nightmares of a musician and a painter, both horrified to see their art forms turned into… read more

Last week, the NY Times published Seth Schiesel’s effusive review of The Beatles: Rock Band. Calling the game a “transformative entertainment experience,” Schiesel argued that it “may be the most important video game yet made.” Schiesel’s logic is sensical: the combination of Beatles + videogame gives baby boomers something concrete to share with their kids and grandkids. Harmonix, a company… read more