My department at Georgia Tech has an open tenure-track position. Please distribute, apply, etc.! Georgia TechDigital Media Tenure-Track Position Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC), which provides diverse humanistic perspectives on a technological world, is seeking to fill one Digital Media tenure track position at the rank of Assistant Professor, beginning in the fall of 2013. We… 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
A Review of Patrick Crogan's Gameplay Mode in Game Studies 12:1
If game scholars share any intellectual common ground, perhaps it is our tendency to stake claims regarding the scope of game studies. Games are their own cultural form, extending back for millennia, say some. Games are a kind of computational media, say others. Games are a social practice, say others still, or a formal structure, or a kind of storytelling,… read more
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich.
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich. The Shuttle, its escort, and traffic (Reuters). I am a Space Shuttle child. I ogled big exploded view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I built models of it out of plastic and… read more
On MLA Job Leaks
Today the Chronicle of Higher Education reports on MLA Job Leaks, an unauthorized, “rogue” website that is republishing the Modern Language Association (MLA) Job Information List (JIL). Currently university departments have to pay to list jobs, and job seekers have to be members of the MLA or the related Association of Departments of English (ADE) or the Association of Departments… read more
A brief note on Chick-fil-A
After weeks of protests, counter-protests, public outcry, kiss-ins, and other assorted drama surrounding Chick-fil-A’s beliefs about and contributions against gay marriage, news today claims that the company has agreed to various concessions, including ceasing donations to organizations that promote discrimination, specifically against LGBT civil rights. Watching people post this story to Facebook today, I noticed that many were cynical about… read more
Some responses to some responses to some responses
All right, this one of those posts that responds to conversations taking place on multiple blogs and on Facebook, so it’s going to be confusing if you haven’t read everything. Let me try to give you the backstory: First, Levi wrote On Ontology, another account of the difference between ontology and politics. Alex Galloway linked to this post on Facebook,… read more
Some changes in my role and new initiatives
As my college just announced yesterday, I’ll be taking on a slightly different role at Georgia Tech. You can read the full release, but the relevant bits are as follows: I have been named Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies I am also now jointly appointed in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing I… read more
Žižek on "radical" academics
This excerpt from a 2008 article by Slavoj Žižek has been sitting in my notebook for a while, and I thought I’d post it. My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of… read more
September 11 and Distributed Networks
On September 11, 2001 I was supposed to meet with Rick Harshman, an Akamai account executive, in my Los Angeles office. I only remember Rick’s name eleven years later because it kept staring at me from my Outlook calendar that morning suggesting an alternate timeline. I can’t remember why we were going to meet; I was working at a design… read more