How Spent missed the mark
There’s a nice persuasive game making the rounds, called Spent. It was made by ad agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham. The game attempts to illustrate how easily financial hardship and low income work can devolve into homelessness. It does a pretty good job, too, taking the same basic method as did Tenure, the 1975 PLATO game about… read more
Lessons from iCapitalism
Whether via the lamentable trend of gamification or through the very public release of Jane McGonigal’s new book, the topic of videogames’ impact on the real world has been front-and-center of late. Enter iCapitalism, an iOS game that critiques both capitalism and iOS games through a simple design. As in Godville, there’s no gameplay. But unlike that game (which actually… read more
A review of Jane McGonigal's book Reality is Broken
Jane McGonigal’s new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published. The book is filled with bold new ideas and refinements of old ones. It’s targeted at a general readership, but game designers, critics, and scholars will learn… read more
A shortened, slang application.
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the past year. It may sound silly given the ubiquity of the word, but despite all the “apps” on our phones and webpages and other devices, I’m not sure we have a good sense of what it means, or what that meaning implies. I was happy to fall upon this nice explanation… read more
A review of Adam Kotsko's book
Adam Kotsko’s little book Awkwardness is a pleasurable and insightful read, yet another reminder that Zero Books is quickly becoming the trusted source for short, punchy works on philosophy and cultural theory. In the book, Kotsko offers a tiny theory of awkwardness: “The tension of awkwardness indicates that no social order is self-evident and no social order accounts for every… read more
Call for Papers - in Athens!
It’s not often that I get to address both my philosopher friends and my game friends at once, but this is such a case. The Philosophy of Computer Games has released a call for papers for the 2011 conference, which will take place April 6-11 in Athens, Greece. I’m on the program committee this year, and I had a fantastic… read more
A book series, Ian Bogost & Nick Montfort, series editors
Platform Studies is a book series published by the MIT Press that invites authors to investigate the relationships between the hardware and software design of computing systems and the creative works produced on those systems. Platforms have been around for decades, right under our video games and digital art. Those studying new media are now starting to dig down to… read more
We are soon entering our 6th month online, and I want to take a moment to ask you for your help in continuing our mission. Cow Clicker is facing new challenges and encountering new opportunities and both are going to require major funds. Cow Clicker is based on a very radical idea, the realization of the dreams most of us… read more
At the 2010 Society for Literature Science and the Arts Conference
Last week at the Society for Literature Science and the Arts conference, Katherine Behar organized two back-to-back panels on Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF). There were six papers total, and a response to each panel by Katherine Hayles and myself, respectively. To participants, Behar posed the question, “What would a program for Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF) entail?” The first panel attempted general responses,… read more
Why physical movement games are incompatible with our homes
The Microsoft Kinect is available today, and with it come innumerable reviews of its successes and flaws (find a summary of them at Gamasutra). A common property of many negative reviews is the enormous amount of living room space Kinect requires, far more than most people will have in a sizable home let alone a modest apartment. I wrote about… read more