The future lasts forever
This spring I was awarded tenure at the Georgia Institute of Technology and leveled-up to Associate Professor in the School of Literature Communication and Culture. As I tried to think about an appropriate way to announce this accomplishment to my readers here, the phrase that kept entering my head was the one reproduced in the subtitle above: the future lasts… read more
Opinion piece published in Gamasutra
Note: the “Spore Store” description has been updated here to account for misinformation I received researching this material. Full clarification is available at the end of the Gamasutra article. In the games industry, Will Wright’s Spore is surely the most highly anticipated title in recent memory. Everyone knows about it — we’ve been seeing previews and demos and hearing news… read more
My keynote presentation at the 2008 Game Developers Conference Education Summit
Note: this is a written version of the keynote address I gave at the Education Summit at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. The original presentation was extemporaneous and included evocative (rather than explanatory) slides. This version has been adapted from the presentation and the slides in a manner that will hopefully preserve the ideas fully while maintaining their original context:… read more
Introduction to a symposium I organized at Georgia Tech
This past Monday the School of Literature Communication and Culture and the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech hosted a symposium I organized called Dwelling Machines. Here’s the description, too small to read in the event poster above. This symposium asks whether and how technology might alter the way we perceive dwelling. Of particular interest are the aspects… read more
How Boing Boing undermined its own argument against Amazon Kindle
There’s been a strong and decidedly split reaction to Amazon’s new Kindle eBook reader, which was released this week. As of today, Amazon reports that they have sold out of the device, so people are obviously buying it. But concern over its closed nature, including binding users to Amazon’s DRM-based sales channel, have helped the reader earn a 2 1/2… read more
Musings after several months of use, as I prepare to start the semester
This spring, I created an account on Facebook. I’m a web 2.0 cynic (and a cynic in general), so this surprised some of my friends and colleagues. But I was encouraged by so many of them, I wanted to give it a try. For example, Ian McCarthy just wanted an easier way to share pictures with me without having to… read more
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
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
Free software to make Aperture understand your M8, and to automate imports
Download for Mac OS X 152 kb – Mac OS X 10.4+ Apple Aperture is a digital photography post-production tool for Mac. Apple bills it as a professional-grade product on par with Final Cut for video or Logic Pro for audio. Digital camera technology advances quickly, espeically at the high end of the market where Aperture is supposed to complete.… read more
Who I am and what I do, in fewer words
Looking for a bio (long, short)?Looking for photos of me?Want my curriculum vitae?Trying to contact me? Ian Bogost is an author and game designer. He is Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies and Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also holds an appointment in the Scheller College of Business. In addition, Bogost… read more