My plenary address at the Southern Interactive Entertainment & Game Expo
The following is the plenary address I gave today at the first SIEGE conference here in Atlanta on October 6, 2007. The title of the session was â??Games: Can They Be Important?â? My fellow plenary speakers were Ernest Adams and Daniel Greenberg. Today it is possible to work though an entire undergraduate and graduate education in videogames. Whether thatâ??s… 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
The openness of web applications demonstrates the real treachery of the iPhone's closed platform
This is the first in a series of short editorials on the iPhone, which I’ll be writing occasionally. Now that the geekqueues of iDay have come and gone, perhaps we can start talking more seriously about the device without all the fanboy ardor. For some of us who have not (yet) adopted the iPhone, one major disappointment is its status… read more
Who I am and what I do
Looking for a bio (long, short)?Looking for photos of me?Want my curriculum vitae?Trying to contact me? Dr. Ian Bogost is an award-winning author and game designer whose work focuses on videogames and computational media. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an… read more
On the uses of in-game ads for cultural reference. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Monopoly has a long, complex, and generally unknown history. Perhaps the most surprising historical curiosity about this classic game about being a real estate tycoon is that it was originally created with an entirely different set of values in mind.
An Approach to Videogame Criticism
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon A book about comparative videogame criticism: games, philosophy, literature, and art. In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests… read more
A riposte to the Critical Simulation section of Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan's edited collection First Person
You can buy First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game in print. You an also read this article with cross-references to other pieces in the volume at the electronic book review. Simon Penny discusses a specific kind of physical embodiment, having to do with corporeal coupling to simulation devices and videogame characters. Reading his call to consider the… read more