How to use Hartsfield-Jackson like a pro
As an expert user of Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport. I thought it might be fun to share the methods I’ve devised for making use of the airport with minimal impact. These tips assume that you’re a frequent flyer and not just a lamer leisure traveler. They also assume you’re flying Delta, which is pretty much inevitable if you live in and… read more
A terminal of yore
As someone who has worked on simulated television effects for Atari games, I was happy to learn about Cathode, a “vintage terminal emulator” for Mac. It simulates phosphor burn, screen curvature, glare, refresh rates, beam desyncrhonization, jitter, and other effects common to mini-computer terminals of yore. It’s a functioning terminal program, so you can run any of your favorite UNIX… read more
A response to Paul Carr and Chris O'Brien
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
My talk at the 2011 Game Developers Conference "rant" panel
Last year I made a game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Among the many retorts to Cow Clicker‘s characterization of social games, a common one is about creativity. Players of these games, the argument goes, exercise imagination and creativity far beyond what… read more
Newsgames and the Paralysis of Media
I’m at the University of Minnesota this weekend, where Nora Paul has organized a workshop on Newsgames. It’s an excellent group, comprised of equal parts journalists, game developers, and academics. On the flight over, I read Ivor Southwood’s Non-Stop Inertia. It’s about the precarious nature of work in the contemporary world, but I happened across a fantastically wry and apt… read more
A review of the book by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
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
How do scholars want to read and write?
There’s been a flurry of discussion in the speculative realism corner of the blogosphere over the last week about the nature of blogging as an academic pursuit. There are more posts than I can link or summarize (a point to which I’ll return), but for now, you can read Adam Robbert, Levi Bryant, Tim Morton, and Graham Harman on the… read more
On the pleasures and pains of home dining
When dining out, there are a number of criteria by which to judge one’s meal. The quality of the food, of course, and its presentation, and the service, and the ambience for certain. Perhaps the value of the experience relative to expectations, and so forth. But the stakes are different when eating at home, since one has to make the… read more
On the Digital Humanities
Each year, the organizers of the Day of Digital Humanities ask participants the question, “How do you define the digital humanities?” Recently I browsed the many responses scholars have offered over the years. They vary widely, from simple (“Humanities by digital means”) to definitive (“The application of information, computing, and communication technologies to humanities questions, problems, or data”) to vague… read more
GDC Social Game Debate
Now that I’m back from the Game Developers Conference, I’ll post some summaries of my talks. Let’s start with the Are social games legitimate? debate, which moderator Margaret Robertson quickly transformed into an “Are social games evil?” debate. I was clearly the only real detractor on the panel, and I’m happy to be able to adequately summarize my position with… read more