Search Results for press

The Reverence Of Resistance

On the controversial use of the Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man

Earlier this year, the Church of England threatened to sue Sony Computer Entertainment Europe for depicting the Manchester Cathedral in the latter’s sci-fi shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. The church had complained about the game’s inclusion of the cathedral, which was named and modeled after the 700-year-old church in this industrial city in northwest England. After considerable pressure and public… read more

Time for games to grow up

In order to mature properly, videogaming not only needs a Citizen Kane moment; it needs a little humdrum too

Think of any media form – say writing, photography or film. Now think of all of the things you can imagine doing with it. I like to think of this as the “possibility space” – a spectrum running between so-called high art at one end, to tools at the other. High art doesn’t have to be hoity-toity snobbery, and it… read more

How I Stopped Worrying About Gamers And Started Loving People Who Play Games

A response to Justin Peters' recent Slate article. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra

Every week at my company Persuasive Games we get repeated calls and emails from people interested in playing Stone City, the Cold Stone Creamery training game we created back in 2005. In the game, the player services customers at the popular mix-your-own flavor ice cream franchise by assembling the proper concoctions while allocating generally profitable portion sizes. The vast majority… read more

The Configurative Book

Reflections on making books that work more like software

What I have in mind is not much different from Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, a configurative sonnet of 1014 possible configurations. Queneau’s composition is a bit too configurative for my purposes, but the principle is instructive. What if we could take core principles of an argument like the one I make in Unit Operations and offer different… read more

On the iPhone: The Anxiety of Openness

The openness of web applications demonstrates the real treachery of the iPhone's closed platform

This is the first in a series of short editorials on the iPhone, which I’ll be writing occasionally. Now that the geekqueues of iDay have come and gone, perhaps we can start talking more seriously about the device without all the fanboy ardor. For some of us who have not (yet) adopted the iPhone, one major disappointment is its status… read more

My new book has shipped

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

Fatworld in Canada

Coverage of my studio's forthcoming game via the Canadian newswire

A story about Persuasive Games’ forthcoming game Fatworld went out on the Canadian news wire today, appearing on the front page of a number of publications north of the border. You can read the full story in the Winnipeg Free Press, the Victoria Times Colonist, the Ottawa Citizen, or Canada.com. I particularly like the Ottawa Citizen’s website version, because it… read more

Persuasive Games

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

Points of Entry

New newsgame about immigration legislation

The New York Times has published this month’s newsgame, which we created over at the studio. In Points of Entry, you can compete to award Green Cards under the Merit-Based Evaluation System included in legislation recently debated in Congress. The system, proposed in legislation sponsored by Senator Ted Kennedy, outlined a Federal standard for worker visa awards, based not on… read more

Where in the World was Middle Earth?

A geography professor's hypothetical geomorphology of Middle Earth

Do you read Strange Maps? You should, if you’re at all a map geek. It’s a blog about curious cartography. It’s really exactly the kind of site blogs seem to promise, regular musings on a subject so specific or arcane that another medium couldn’t support regular publication. Thanks largely to Boing Boing, there’s been a running meme lately of subway… read more