A Facebook Game about Facebook Games
Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It’s partly a satire, and partly a playable theory of today’s social games, and partly an earnest example of that genre. You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the… read more
On generic names for carbonated soft drinks
Harman links to this lovely map infographic of generic names for soft drinks in the United States (click below for a bigger version). It’s been around for a while but is worth revisiting in light of a few points Graham makes in his post. First, Graham wonders what comprises the green “other” category in these maps, which is far more… read more
The Realist Invitation and the Correlationist Imperative
A lively discussion erupted from my post on philosophy and politics of a few days ago. Among other things, commenters revisited the relationship between ontology and politics, issues OOO proponents in particular have attempted to disentangle. Among the many lengthy comments from David Rylance comes this snippet, which may have finally helped me understand something fundamental about the whole ontology/politics… read more
More on Politics and Philosophy
In recent days there’s been a flare-up of discussion about speculative realism and politics. It’s a more mild and reasoned one than previous debates, with contributions well worth reading. First read Chris Vitale’s post Queering Speculative Realism. Then read Diversifying Speculative Realisms on Archive Fire. After that go read Levi Bryant’s post, which responds to the first two. The argument… read more
Plus yet another update on A Slow Year
My forthcoming game A Slow Year is on exhibit at a show curated by Lara Sánchez Coterón, Playful & Playable: Critica y Experimentacion con Videojuegos. It runs until September 15 at Sala Amarica, in Vitoria Gasteiz (in northern Spain). Here’s a description of the exhibition, which also includes work by Eastwood – Real Time Strategy Group, Anita Fontaine y Mike… read more
Thoughts on Karate Kid
Recently I’ve been interested in remakes, so I was eager to see The Karate Kid, which revisits the now-classic 1984 film of the same name. The remake is one of the most faithful I can remember; in a time (in a world?) of updates and adaptations that wax nostalgic about TV, film, and toys of the 1970s and 80s while… read more
Journalism at Play
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon Newsgames offers a broad and comprehensive look at the past, present, and future uses of videogames in journalism. Co-authored with Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer. Journalism has embraced digital media in its struggle to survive. But most online journalism just translates existing practices to the Web: stories are… read more
Why I Am Interested in Both
Like every sane person who does anything in public, I egosearch to see how people are reacting to things I’m doing. I use a few tools, but mostly Icerocket, which offers a condensed view of blog, Twitter, news, and Facebook reactions to search terms. The latter results are new, thanks to Facebook’s recent privacy “upgrades” that allow wall posts to… read more
Graham has a short post up mentioning Heidegger’s distaste for the crossword puzzle. Given that we have a whole chapter about crosswords and related puzzles in Newsgames, I’m particularly keen to read this if anyone digs it up. Heidegger’s reaction was actually quite common. Some may not realize that the crossword puzzle incited a moral panic when it rose to… read more
Apple and the Rhetoric of Change
Now that yet another Steve Jobs keynote is over, I find myself more interested in what Apple was saying about itself than what others are saying about its new gadgets. Despite my apparent pique pommaire, I like Apple stuff. I do my computing on a Mac and I have an iPhone and so forth. But as both a user and… read more