Search Results for politics

It’s interview season, apparently. I’ve done a number of interviews recently, and I figured it would be easier to link them all at once for my devoted readers enjoyment (that’s you). First, Laureano Ralon published oan interview with me on Figure/Ground Communications. The interview covers the state of scholarship and the academy, McLuhan, and game studies. Laureano has been conducted… read more

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

Each year, the organizers of the Day of Digital Humanities ask participants the question, “How do you define the digital humanities?” Recently I browsed the many responses scholars have offered over the years. They vary widely, from simple (“Humanities by digital means”) to definitive (“The application of information, computing, and communication technologies to humanities questions, problems, or data”) to vague… read more

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

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

Now that you’ve ordered your copy of Newsgames: Journalism at Play (you did that, right?) I’d like to remind you that the Newsgames blog is full to the brim with new content. You can find it at newsgames.gatech.edu/blog. Here are some of the latest posts: Pac-Man’s Political Cartoon Games Representation and Meaning: Comparing Mansion Impossible to Property Savvy The Museum… read more

I just read Ted Friedman’s thought-provoking article “The Politics of Magic: Fantasy Media, Technology, and Nature in the 21st Century,” about the reasons for the rise of fantasy genres in popular culture. He’s currently developing this line of thought into a book (to be titled Centaur Manifesto, I believe), but there are lots of interesting ideas to take away from… read more

I’ve complained about this before in passing, on Twitter, but it’s become such a major issue for my sanity that I now feel compelled to work through it. Today it’s raining in Atlanta. When it rains in Atlanta, no matter how mild is the rain, the traffic lights go out. (And really, it happens sometimes when it’s not even raining.)… read more

In October, 2001, Giovanna Borradori conducted an interview with Jacques Derrida about the 9/11 attacks. The result was paired with a similar conversation with Jurgen Habermas, and published as Philosophy in a Time of Terror. You can read exerpts of both interviews online. I happened to read the interview only recently, right around the same time that the supposed “Derrida… read more

Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton’s New Republic review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand’s suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school should be hard because it’s supposed to “test people who… read more