Three reviews as three lenses through which to approach and appreciate an unusual videogame.
Originally published at Gamasutra One: Nil Person Videogames are narcissistic. They are about you, even when they put you in someone else’s shoes. You are a space marine among hell spawn. You are a mafioso just released from prison. You are a bear with a bird in your backpack. You are a Tebowing Tim Tebow. We may think we play… read more
Prosperity and austerity in contemporary philosophy
I’ve had the pleasure of visiting with a number of classes recently after they’ve read Alien Phenomenology. Very different groups as well, from freshmen to graduate students. A common question that arose in many of these conversations relates to the consequences of object-oriented ontology. This question usually takes a form like, “Doesn’t object-oriented ontology risk turning our attention away from… read more
On cadence and deep design in the current social games environment. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra
Imagine that you were a big game studio that had built your business around free-to-play social network games. Say that you had recently gone public, but your stock was down sixfold from its IPO price. And let’s also imagine that the social network facilitating most of your business was also taking a hammering on Wall Street. Imagine too that analysts… read more
Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation
It’s hard to overestimate Alan Turing’s contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine’s signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In… read more
Some responses to the Alien Phenomenology reading group
Following the discussion of chapter 1, Darius Kazemi has posted discussion notes for chapters 2 and 3 of Alien Phenomenology—Ontography and Metaphorism, respectively. I thought I’d make a few comments on the topics discussed there. Time Time is discussed as a particularly mind-bending topic in OOO. AP doesn’t offer a theory of time; the conversation chez Darius is about meanwhile… read more
A comment on Alien Phenomenology
I was recently shown this comment by Daniel Joseph from a discussion of chapter 1 of Alien Phenomenology. The thing that Ian is doing here is positing that philosophy can be practiced for the pure joy of things, as a way into the thing for it the thing itself. It is the application of the theory of OOO to OOO.… read more
A response to Cameron Kunzelman
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not exactly sure what blogging means to me these days. But whether by accident or design, I’ve been avoiding some of the back-and-forth debate that both helps and hinders the work of philosophy online these days. That said, this is one of those back-and-forth response posts, this on answering some of the… read more
An update on my next book
I talked to my publisher this week and got news that Alien Phenomenology is scheduled to land in the warehouse by March 7. It should be shipping to booksellers immediately thereafter. If you preorder from Amazon.com, you’ll see it ship out that very week. While I can’t make any promises, sometimes these dates move up thanks to happy accident, so… read more
A response to Stanley Fish, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and others
For the first time in five years, I attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. This is the main conference for scholars of language and literature, with about 8,000 attendees at this year’s event in Seattle. Among the big things going down this year: the ongoing clash of cultures between the “traditional humanities”—the scholars who read books and write books… read more
Responses to Parikka
Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media among numerous other books, recently posed a series of questions about object-oriented ontology. Levi Bryant has already responded, as has Paul Caplan, and I like both of their responses. I thought I’d offer my own here, so here goes. (The block quotes are Jussi’s questions.) Is not the talk of “object” something that summons… read more