On substituting programming languages for natural languages in the humanities
Last year I learned about a rumor swirling around the comparative literature department at UCLA, where I did my PhD. Supposedly I had managed to get C++ to count as one of the three languages required for the degree. It’s not true, for the record, but it is a topic that comes up from time to time—substituting programming languages for… read more
Anything you can click you can cow click!
Last year, the social gaming phenomenon Cow Clicker captured the world’s imoogination, offering players the opportunity to click on a cow every six hours—or even more often. Since July 2010, more than 50,000 people have clicked over 50 breeds of cows over 5 million times, engorging their accownts with over 5 million mooney, Cow Clicker’s in-game currency. Cow Clicker distilled… 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 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
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
Cultural Studies, circa 1995
I recently fell upon this reprint of a Lingua Franca article from 1995, “The Routledge Revolution: Has Academic Publishing Gone Tabloid?” written about Bill Germano during the golden age of cultural studies book publishing. One thing is for certain: By spotting intellectual trends ahead of the curve and responding with a flash flood of suitable titles, Germano has changed the… read more
The book jacket for my game
A Slow Year has gone to the printer at long last. I thought I’d share the jacket art. I’ve shown the illustration here before, but not the cover. This is the jacket for the standard edition, which will be available in trade paperback with software for Windows and Mac. The limited edition with Atari cartridge will be different, of course,… read more
Gary Yost on Videogames
Gary Yost, creator of 3D Studio Max, on videogames in San Francisco Magazine: Several years later, Autodesk saw Yost’s work and gave him a contract to start developing three-dimensional design software. That got Yost jazzed up; his father was an architect, and he loved the idea of helping to build and create things. But he started having qualms when companies… read more
Object-Oriented Misunderstandings
A while back Jim Brown mentioned to me that there would be an object-oriented rhetoric panel at this year’s Rhetoric Society of America conference. Jim attended RSA but wasn’t able to make the panel; still, he’s managed to dig up the papers and he wrote up a summary over on the RSA’s Blogora. I’m not yet sure what object-oriented rhetoric… read more