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

About Me

Who I am and what I do

Looking for a bio (long, short)?Looking for photos of me?Want my curriculum vitae?Trying to contact me? Dr. Ian Bogost is an award-winning author and game designer whose work focuses on videogames and computational media. 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… read more

Why We Need More Boring Games

About making games ordinary. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

Fashion mogul Marc Eckoâ??s eponymous clothing company now brings in $1 billion a year in revenue. Recently, Ecko has branched out from rhino-emblazoned t-shirts, shoes, and underpants to popular media, including the consumer culture rag Complex Magazine, the extreme lifestyle YouTube knock-off eckotv.com, and the 2006 video game Mark Eckoâ??s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure.

The Missing Rituals of Exergames

Exergames need social contexts. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

Interest in exergames has grown in recent years, largely on account of their potential to replace sedentary leisure activity with active leisure activity. Instead of sitting in front of the television idle, mouth agape as we ponder our love for Raymond or hatred for House, we might step-to with DDR or jump around with Eye Toy.

Experiencing Place in Los Santos and Vice City

In The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto, edited by Nathan Garrelts. Co-authored with Dan Klainbaum.

Read the entire article in print in The Culture and Meaning of Grand Theft Auto The Grand Theft Auto videogame series puts the player in large, semi-realistic urban environments. Despite their apparent credibility, these environments are not re-creations of real urban locales, but rather remixed, hybridized cities fashioned from popular cultureâ??s notions of real American cities. Locality, the sense of… read more

Review of Convergence Culture

A review of media studies scholar Henry Jenkins's recent book

I read Henry Jenkins’s new book Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide this weekend. The book is a short, smart, buttery read on a hot topic, and it is sure to draw both popular and academic interest. Jenkins is a multifaceted media scholar, a critic of vaudeville, fan fiction, comics, film, games, and more. He is also the… read more