Writing

Here’s the Cow Clicker cow displayed enormously across the culture section of the Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden’s main newspaper. There’s something tantalizing and disturbing about seeing the cow on newsprint. The article it accompanies can be read online, although it’s in Swedish.

Jane McGonigal’s new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published. The book is filled with bold new ideas and refinements of old ones. It’s targeted at a general readership, but game designers, critics, and scholars will learn… read more

I’ve been thinking about this question a lot over the past year. It may sound silly given the ubiquity of the word, but despite all the “apps” on our phones and webpages and other devices, I’m not sure we have a good sense of what it means, or what that meaning implies. I was happy to fall upon this nice explanation… read more

I’ve been busy since the holidays catching up and preparing for the new term, which makes this the requisite occasional “I haven’t posted on the blog” blog post. Since I’ve been reduced to such self-referential shame, I figured I might as well take things even further and offer my readers a massive dump of recentish press about me. For starters,… read more

Switched.com ran a story offering their assement of The Best Tech Writing of 2010, and my piece Cow Clicker: The Making of Obsession. I’m in good company, too: others in the top 15 include Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, William Gibson, Gary Kasparov, and the inimitable Onion. I’d never heard of Switched.com, but apparently it’s a reasonably popular AOL technology lifestyle… read more

Here’s a quick link summary of my 2010, including both major events/work and smaller moments that took the form of blog posts. Happy new year, all. Disney cease-and-desist – the turtlenecked hairshirt – the Art History of Games – Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes – Heavy Rain – Pascal spoken here – I hate gamification – Knight News Challenge – philosopher… read more

We saw TRON: Legacy. My eight year-old daughter wrote this review of the film, which she suggested would be appropriate for blogging. If you haven’t seen Tron Legacy yet please for your own good don’t go see it. Because if you did then you would almost definitely die of boredom. I guess if you like to sit and watch Boom!… read more

Just a quick note to let you know that our book Newsgames: Journalism at Play is now available on Kindle. The price is $9.99. Its been interesting to see the increase in demand for my books on Kindle. I’ve had a fair number of relatively anxious requests about when this one would be available digitally. Something readers might not know:… read more

Kyle Orland, co-author of the forthcoming book Farmville for Dummies, writes this introduction to a two-part feature over at Gamasutra, by Tadhg Kelly. The title: “How Zynga’s CityVille Has Compelled 70 Million Players.” Given today’s surprising new interest in Cow Clicker over on Reddit, I thought I’d share some delightful snippets Orland extracted from Kelly’s work. One of the keys… read more

Adam Kotsko’s little book Awkwardness is a pleasurable and insightful read, yet another reminder that Zero Books is quickly becoming the trusted source for short, punchy works on philosophy and cultural theory. In the book, Kotsko offers a tiny theory of awkwardness: “The tension of awkwardness indicates that no social order is self-evident and no social order accounts for every… read more