Search Results for videogames

The Guardian ran a story today about videogames and cognition, which covers the usual assumption that games are popular/good/whatever because they tap into some innate cognitive drive, whether it be for learning or obsession. Good games, the article concludes, are the ones that do what we want, but that we don’t know we want. This, it turns out, amounts to… read more

You can now preorder my new book, How To Do Things With Videogames. It’s a shortish book, about videogames as a medium. The book includes new essays as well as new versions of earlier essays, bookended by a bit-sized theoretical argument about games as a medium. Here’s the blurb, followed by the book cover (which isn’t yet up on Amazon): In… read more

Cross-posted from PBS Idea Lab Earlier this month a group of journalists, game designers, and academics gathered at the University of Minnesota for a workshop on newsgames. I was there, as was fellow Knight News Challenge winner and San Jose Mercury News tech business writer Chris O’Brien. After the event, Chris wrote a a recap of the meeting. In turn,… read more

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next is a book with a stark premise: historically, cities have developed and thrived around transportation technologies. The present age is that of the airplane, and cities will be built for and around them. What seaports were to the eighteenth century, railroads to the nineteenth, and highways to the twentieth, so airports will be to… read more

Whether via the lamentable trend of gamification or through the very public release of Jane McGonigal’s new book, the topic of videogames’ impact on the real world has been front-and-center of late. Enter iCapitalism, an iOS game that critiques both capitalism and iOS games through a simple design. As in Godville, there’s no gameplay. But unlike that game (which actually… read more

Fitness expert Jack LaLanne died yesterday at age 96. He’s most notable for starting the first health clubs, but anyone who lived with television in the late twentieth century couldn’t have missed LaLanne’s many programs and endorsements. Despite his fame, and despite the recent popularity of home fitness videogames like Wii Fit and EA Sports Active, few know that LaLanne… read more

Jane McGonigal’s new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published. The book is filled with bold new ideas and refinements of old ones. It’s targeted at a general readership, but game designers, critics, and scholars will learn… read more

Earlier this fall I gave a keynote at the Vienna Games Conference, aka Future and Reality of Gaming, or FROG. The video of the talk has now been posted, and you can watch it in its entirety. The talk tries to answer the question in the title… the gist of my response is that sports videogames are variants, not simulations.… read more

Slavoj Žižek tends to make occasional offhand references to videogames. Here’s one from an interview in New Scientist from last month (read it here instead if you don’t have a subscription) And what is your take on reality? There is an old philosophical idea about God being stupid and crazy, not finishing his creation. The idea is that God (but… read more

Our book Newsgames: Journalism at Play should be hitting the streets in a couple weeks. If you’re eager to get your hands on some of the material in advance, you’ll be happy to learn that The Atlantic just published an excerpt from the first chapter, which you can read here.