In the new issue of Game Studies
A new issue of the free online scholarly journal Game Studies has just been published. Game Studies is now in its eleventh year, a fact as startling as it is encouraging. In addition to new articles on games and pragmatist aesthetics, bishÅjo games, serious games, and the use of music playlists in games, the issue is jam-packed with eight book… read more
Edge Magazine's Feature on Cow Clicker
The May issue of the UK-based consumer videogame publication Edge Magazine included a four-page, full-color spread about Cow Clicker, written by David Thomas. Edge is sometimes hard to find in North America, but they recently put the piece online, so you can read it there. The article is fantastic. It’s one thing to be compared to Duchamp or to Rasputin.… read more
Or, How to Stake Vampire Publishing
Alex Reid wrote an excellent rejoinder against academic book publishing last week. The post was inspired by a discussion at the recent Computers and Writing conference about traditional publishing versus blogging and other forms of digital publishing. It’s an old, perhaps even a boring topic at this point, so Alex turns the subject back on itself: most scholarly monograph book… read more
By my nine year-old
If you enjoyed my daughter’s review of TRON: Legacy, or her recent take on Athens singer/songwriter Madeline, then I know what you’ve been asking yourself: When will she review a film by Werner Herzog? Mercifully, the wait is over. Her review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams appears below. I don’t get why people make pointless movies. I mean, it’s not… read more
What Amazon.com's ebook sales figures really mean
Among the many overzealous, under-synthesized tech business stories today, perhaps the most surprising is the news that Amazon is now selling more ebooks than print books. 105 ebooks for every 100 print books, as it happens. While 105 > 100, a more accurate but less scintillating headline might be, “Amazon ebook sales on parity with print book sales.” But I… read more
A response to the NEA frenzy
Last week the National Endowment for the Arts announced their new call for proposals in an “Arts in Media” category. This category, in the NEA’s words, “seeks to make the excellence and diversity of the arts widely available to the American public through the national distribution of innovative media projects about the arts and media projects that can be considered… read more
Videogames against Cognition, against Aesthetics
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
How To Do Things with Videogames, coming late August
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
On the rhetoric of gamification. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
I had been trying to ignore gamification, hoping it would go away, like an ill-placed pimple or an annoying party guest or a Katy Perry earworm. But a recent encounter with the concept has made me realize that plugging my ears and covering my eyes to it is a losing strategy. Even if our goal is opposition, we need to… read more
Another reading of Ulysses on Twitter
Since 2007, Ian McCarthy and I have performed an act we call Twittering Rocks on June 16. It’s a day otherwise known as Bloomsday, the day on which the events of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place. Our rendition focuses on the central chapter of the book, Wandering Rocks, in which many of the novel’s characters encounter each other as… read more