On representations of holiday cheer in videogames. From my "Persuasive Games column" at Gamasutra
It’s the time of year to find Christmas all around you, no matter where you go. Lights on neighborhood shrubbery. Red bows on downtown streetlamps. Christmas music on the FM dial. Pine-scented candles on the mantle. Gingerbread lattes at Starbucks. Red and green-wrapped versions of the consumer goods you buy the rest of the year in brown and puce. In… read more
Links to my week of posts as guest editor
Last week I served as guest editor at popular games and game culture blog Kotaku All in all, I wrote 45 articles at Kotaku, which I’ve now linked below. I haven’t even tried to read all the comments on those threads though. I had a great time doing it and I’m really grateful that Brian Crecente extended the invitation.
Built-in DVD players forbid screen captures with software constraint
Recently, I had the need to capture a still from a DVD a Persuasive Games client had sent over as guidelines for some game assets. I didn’t want to rip the whole DVD, so I went to use the built-in screen capture facility in Apple OS X: the old standby Command-Shift-3. I was surprised to see the following result. The… read more
Reflections on making books that work more like software
What I have in mind is not much different from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a configurative sonnet of 1014 possible configurations. Queneau’s composition is a bit too configurative for my purposes, but the principle is instructive. What if we could take core principles of an argument like the one I make in Unit Operations and offer different… read more