Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty
In 1999, the Silicon Alley entrepreneur Josh Harris rented an underground warehouse in lower Manhattan and subjugated a hundred friends to a home-made police state he named “QUIET.” Its residents slept in open bunk pods stacked atop one another, each with a bus depot television with a closed-circuit feed from every other pod. Quieters partook of bacchanal feasts and abusive… read more
Design Beyond the Object
In addition to our new book Newsgames, the Fall 2010 MIT Press catalog (PDF) includes a wonderful new title called NONOBJECT, by designer Branko LukiÄ? (frog design, IDEO) and writer Barry M. Katz (California College of Design). I paste the press’s blurb below in its entirety, it’s so lurid and wonderful. The “objective” world is one of facts, data, and… read more
My GDC 2010 Microtalk
What follows is my short talk from the microtalks session at last week’s Game Developers Conference. The format was a modified pecha kucha, with 20 slides advancing automatically every 16 seconds. The theme provided by organizer Rich Lemarchand was simply, “Play with Us.” I chose to explore the relationship between developers and their audiences. This is a very famous… read more
Also, win a copy of a book I haven't yet written
Sometimes serious ideas emerge from the strangest places. Last week Harman tossed an offhand question onto his blog: Who is the most overrated philosopher?. It sparked quite serious discussion all over. So serious that before long, Harman found himself wondering if an anthology of opinions on “overrated philosophers” could indeed become a serious work of philosophy. I now find myself… read more
A chapbook of game poems for Atari VCS, PC, and Mac
among the “Ten Most Anticipated Games of the Year” —Voxy “Excellent and completely out there.” —Wired “A Slow Year takes zen inspiration a step further, with four interactive haiku.” —Boing Boing Winner of the Virtuoso and Vanguard awards 2010 Indiecade Festival A Slow Year is a collection of four games, one for each season, about the experience of observing things.… read more
Schroeder played the piano and all of the girls loved him.
I’m not a big fan of fanfic, but I am quite enamored of appropriations of pop culture that shed surprising new light on their source material. For some time, my favorite example of this sort of thing has been Garfield Minus Garfield. By removing the titular cat from each comic strip, Dan Walsh exposed “the existential angst of a certain… read more
The NSF Prefers Strings, Crayons
After an unintentional hiatus, last week I resumed following Georgia Tech CS colleague Mark Guzdial’s Amazon blog. His latest salvo is a thought-provoking piece called Using computing to teach computing (Hint: Don’t use the “P” word). The post centers around a question Mark posed to Jeannette Wing, Director of the Computing & Information Science & Engineering branch of the NSF… read more
On an artistic style in contemporary videogames. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Are games art? Last year, what Jim Preston wrote drove the nail into the coffin of this absurd and useless question: To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards. Americans’ attitude towards art is profoundly divided, disjointed and confused; and my message to gamers is to simply ignore the… read more
who misconstrues my work and that of my colleagues
(1) I’m not going to bother to write a thorough prose response to your recent Escapist article Quibus Lusoribus Bono? Who is Game Studies Good For?, but only numbered objections and comments. Readers, you’ll have to go read Travis’s article before any of these will make sense. (2) Your article is based on the premise that Douglas Wilson looks down… read more
Following reflections on Georgia Tech president Wayne Clough's appointment to the Secretaryship of the Smithsonian
Today G. Wayne Clough, the president of Georgia Tech, announced his plans to step down as of mid-summer to take the top post at the Smithsonian Institute. The Smithsonian has been plagued by many problems in recent years, from major budget overruns to a crippling executive corruption scandal last year that forced the last Secretary out. The challenges of the… read more