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If we accept the premise that the humanities should orient toward the world and not toward a private, scholarly sanctuary, then what trends are already facilitating that process? One candidate is the “digital humanities,” a topic about which I have remained silent for too long, despite the fact that I direct a digital media graduate program and teach in a… read more

Download the TextMate Atari VCS Support Installer (Mac OS X 10.5+, 60k) Several years ago I was really getting heavily into Atari VCS programming—for teaching, for art, and for research on Racing the Beam. VCS programming is notoriously hard at first, but like anything once you get the hang of it, it feels natural. What never felt natural, however, was… read more

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

I thought I’d share few recent mentions of me in the media. I try not to do this with every little mention, but all of these are really good articles that you should read anyway. First, Chris Suellentrop’s New York Times Magazine story Video Games that Bring Afghanistan Home. It’s a wide-ranging feature, and even though I only have one… read more

Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton’s New Republic review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand’s suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school should be hard because it’s supposed to “test people who… read more

Ed Fries, who used to run game publishing for Xbox, has created a demake of Halo for the Atari 2600. I’d talked to Ed about the project when I was exhibiting A Slow Year at the IGF this year, and he’d been kind enough to show me some late stage builds of the game. The result is excellent, both as… read more

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

I’ve been watching reactions to Apple’s controversial decision to prohibit the publication of iPhone applications created in environments other than Apple’s own. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g.,… read more

Today in my Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes class we talked about disassembling binaries and doing graphical hacks. These are the simplest kind of ROM hacks to do, as they only require changes to data in the disassembly, which is usually relatively easy to find and identify. My in-class example involved hacking David Crane’s Activision title Freeway. My simple hack… read more