Writing

The Dutch newspaper Het Parool ran a story last Saturday about Cow Clicker. You can read a scan of the story below (in Dutch, click for the large version), but equally interesting to me is the fact that the paper put an enormous Cow Clicker cow on the front page of their media section (also below), just like Svenska Dagbladet… read more

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a paper titled “Asynchronous Multiplay” for the Other Players Conference on Multiplayer Phenomena, which was held at IT University, Copenhagen in December of that year. To give you an idea about how long ago 2004 was on the timescale of game development and game research, consider a few facts: Facebook was incorporated in… read more

I started working on my Atari “game poems” project A Slow Year almost exactly three years ago. I had spent an idle summer afternoon writing 6502 assembly on the couch, and the first versions of the summer game took form. Slowly, over time, the work revealed itself to me: a set of four 1k games, one for each season, inspired… read more

This is hard to explain. Something’s happening to Cow Clicker. Some months ago, evil bovine lords broke into Cow Clicker and started making demands. Their mysterious clues became the Cow ClickARG, which, Inception-like, sent up Alternate Reality Games from within the send-up of a Facebook game. Clues were scattered by the “bovine gods” around the globe, where “cowllective intelligence” helped… read more

If you liked my Latour Litanizer, a tool for creating lists of objects, then you’ll also like Darius Kazemi’s new little gizmo, Objects that are enumerated in Graham Harman’s “Prince of Networks”. Here’s what he did: I wrote a script to parse the original text [Prince of Networks] for things that are probably lists of objects, and then did a… read more

Jean Georges is one of four Michelin Three Star restaurants in New York city. It’s very French, so French that you’re just as likely to hear the language spoken as English. That and the environment in the main dining room—a single, enormous, plush chamber on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel—make the place feel monarchal and exotic. The… read more

I’m spending this week and the start of next putting the final touches on the limited editions of A Slow Year. This involves a lot of trimming and glueing, as I’m attaching images and plaques to their final homes on books and boxes. It’s hard to explain how good it feels to trim and glue paper instead of writing emails… read more

It’s hard to believe, but tomorrow will mark the fifth time Ian McCarthy and I will execute our Bloomsday on Twitter performance “Twittering Rocks.” (For more information, read here and here.) New this year: thanks to @francophony, you can follow all 50+ Ulysses characters via this convenient list. When we first started doing this in 2007, Twitter was still a… read more

In the description of my Amiga/Joyboard homage game Guru Meditation, I made the following statement: As far as I know there have been no games released for the joyboard since Mogul Maniac (not counting two unreleased Amiga prototypes from the early 80s), so Guru Meditation also reminds us of the long history of experimentation with physical controllers in the mainstream… read more

Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested… read more