Apple and the Rhetoric of Change
Now that yet another Steve Jobs keynote is over, I find myself more interested in what Apple was saying about itself than what others are saying about its new gadgets. Despite my apparent pique pommaire, I like Apple stuff. I do my computing on a Mac and I have an iPhone and so forth. But as both a user and… read more
Branding Your Weird Academic Field
I’ve been meaning to post a link to Ethan Watrall’s April article Building an Interdisciplinary Identity in a (Mostly) Non-Interdisciplinary Academic World. It includes a number of tips for branding yourself as an academic when working outside of or in-between traditional fields. I know that many academics, particularly those straggler pinko humanists, sometimes writhe at the idea of “marketing” themselves… read more
Cover, blurb, price, etc.
MIT Press has put up the informational webpage for Newsgames, and the book should be appearing in the catalog and in books in print (and therefore at Amazon et al) soon enough. You can read the description on the MIT Press site, and I’ve also pasted it below. The list price is $24.95, which I’d guess will translate into a… read more
Software grows like new leaves
Thanks to Jan Holmevik, Cynthia Haynes for hosting me and Greg Ulmer at Clemson University last week. The occasion was a seminar and symposium on games and rhetoric, organized thanks to Victor Vitanza and his Pre/Text journal. I enjoyed lively conversation with students and faculty alike. Somehow it was the first time I’d met Ulmer, who gave a thought-provoking talk… read more
On the White House and Videogames
In a large theater at the 2010 Game Developers Conference, ten thousand game makers gathered for the Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice awards ceremonies, where the best indie and mainstream games of the year are celebrated by and for their creators. In between the two, an unusual video was shown. Aneesh Chopra, the United States’s first Chief Technology… read more
from Videogaming Illustrated, October 1982
One of my students found a bunch of old computer and videogame magazines and shared them with me last week. I’ve been slowly perusing them as time allows, and I found something surprising in the October 1982 issue of Videogaming Illustrated. It’s from a multi-page feature called Star Words, in which different celebrities, mostly actors, offer their impressions of videogames.… read more
What the state of women in Hollywood's tells us about women in games
Today I listened to NPR On Point on the ride home. The topic was “A big year for Hollywood women?”, with film critics Manohla Dargis and Nicole LaPorte discussing (and deflating) recent buzz about the “Year of the Woman” in movies. If you listen to the show online, you’ll be struck by how much the conversation about women in film… read more
Making books appealing
Harman offers his thoughts on the virtues of short books, with a mention of the conversation he and I had in Cairo about the constraints of the Atari and how they relate metaphorically to book authoring. The flavor of the genial teasing seems to be “haha, getting lazy there, aren’t you?” But in fact, it is harder work to compress… read more
Mark Fisher on discipline and pedagogy
I read Mark Fisher’s excellent little book Capitalist Realism this week. It’s a short book long on insights, many of which provoked me, some of which I disagreed with, and a few of which I want to share. Here’s the first of the latter kind, from a discussion of the post-disciplinary nature of contemporary higher education. Ask students to read… read more
A note from my critics
I have many critics. Critics are helpful, wonderful creatures who produce as much pleasure as ire, partly because they provide amusement as often as commentary. Normally I don’t respond to the more vocally invective ones, but I’m making an exception for “videogames bitch-site” Remedial Waste. They offer the Remedial Lexicon, a list of “unsound videogame terminology.” It’s mostly vituperation sans… read more