Some August miscellany
I’ve been busy dealing with administrative preparations for the start of the fall term, and finishing up a couple of summer projects. I have a bunch of blogmatter in the hopper, but in the meantime, here’s a few recent bits and pieces of mine that you can find elsewhere: I was on last week’s Playable Character podcast, talking about Cow… read more
...but a few successful books might
Via my colleague Mark Guzdial, I’ve just learned that Rice University Press is being shut down entirely. It’s unfortunate to see a university press shuttered, but it comes as no surprise that some will fall given the perfect storm of a terrible current economic climate in both universities and in the book industry. But Rice UP is unique because it… read more
Twitter has begun allowing its users to showcase NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, as profile pictures on their accounts. It’s the latest public victory for this form of … and, you know, there’s the problem. What the hell is an NFT anyway? There are answers. Twitter calls NFTs “unique digital items, such as artwork, with proof of ownership that’s stored on… read more
The option to bypass title sequences seems convenient, but it also tightens the bond between viewer and screen.
When the commercial web was new, its acolytes were eager to show it off. The scientific-research and literary communities, where the web originated, envisioned it as a nonlinear platform for authorship and publishing. But the dot-coms and the advertisers and the interactive agencies saw the web as a new kind of billboard or video screen. To them, it was the… read more
Living with Apple
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon The evolution and meaning of our love affair with Apple and its devices. At dinnertime: check. At a traffic light: check. In bed at the end of the day: check. In line at the coffee shop: check. In The Geek’s Chihuahua, Ian Bogost addresses the modern love affair… read more
The game studio I co-founded. We make games about social and political issues.
Persuasive Games designs, builds, and distributes videogames for persuasion, instruction, and activism I do professional game development and game design consulting at Persuasive Games. I co-founded the studio in 2003 with Gerard LaFond. Persuasive Games created the first official US Presidential Election game for Howard Dean in 2003. Since then, we’ve created games for political campaigns, advertisers, educators, and corporations,… read more
My Twitter microrant sideline during the AAUP 2013 plenary
The annual American Association of University Publishers meeting is going on this week. This morning, a plenary was held on “Three Big Ideas in Publishing.” I wasn’t in attendance, but the conference has a thriving Twitter backchannel on #aaup13. I have very strong feelings about university presses, partly because I’ve been so fortunate at their hands, and partly because there’s… read more
A teaser for a new project
I’ve been working for months on a new writing and publishing project that continues and extends my interest in thinking and writing about things. Here’s a teaser: objectsobjectsobjects.com. Want more info? Wait for the official announcement and full website, or just ask!
I need undergrads interested in electronics looking for summer work
Under the aegis of the Georgia Tech branch of the Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing, my PhD student Tom Jenkins and I have spent the year thinking about and making what we call “tinkering platforms”—those simple hardware prototyping systems like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and so forth. Our gripe about these systems is that they are too expensive,… read more
The rhetoric of "The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age"
The Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age is a new document authored and signed by twelve scholars, technologists, and entrepreneurs including Duke professor and author Cathy Davidson, organizational technologist John Seely Brown, and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. It’s been making the rounds among those of us interested in such topics, also receiving coverage at The… read more