Opinion piece published in Gamasutra
From Gamasutra’s summary: In a fiery opinion piece, game designer/author Ian Bogost examines NPD chart trends to suggest that Sony’s lack of unified message on PS3, Blu-ray and the ‘average consumer’ is rendering ineffective its pitch to users. It’s also probably the only piece on Gamasutra that mentions Jacques Lacan. Sony is a global conglomerate which is significantly different from… 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.
Musings after several months of use, as I prepare to start the semester
This spring, I created an account on Facebook. I’m a web 2.0 cynic (and a cynic in general), so this surprised some of my friends and colleagues. But I was encouraged by so many of them, I wanted to give it a try. For example, Ian McCarthy just wanted an easier way to share pictures with me without having to… read more
Persuasive Games, my book about games and rhetoric, is now available.
My new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, is out and shipping from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller. The book is about how videogames make arguments. I offer a theory of rhetoric for games, then I discuss a great many examples from commercial and non-commercial games, focusing on the areas of politics, advertising and learning. The book should… read more
The Expressive Power of Videogames
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon A book about how videogames make arguments: rhetoric, computing, politics, advertising, learning. Videogames are both an expressive medium and a persuasive medium; they represent how real and imagined systems work, and they invite players to interact with those systems and form judgments about them. In this innovative analysis,… read more
Some of my work in the July 2007 issue of Wired Magazine
This month’s Wired Magazine (July 2007, or 15.07 in Wired volume parlance) devoted their regular games feature to some of my recent work at Persuasive Games. The main subject of the story is Fatworld, a game we’ve been working on since Fall 2006 or so. It’s a game about the politics of nutrition, about the relationships between obesity, nutrition, and… 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
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