Two cows battle for supremacy, and you decide the victor
In celebration of Gamasutra naming Cow Clicker one of the top 5 cult games of 2010, a glorious new feature is born! Cowfight! Now two cow types can battle to supremacy. Each click counts as a vote, thus buying and clicking a cow marks a player’s support. Watch your cow rise to glory! The first cowfight is ripped from the… read more
Geoffrey West and Urban Withdrawal.
There’s a terrific article in today’s New York Times about theoretical physicist Geoffrey West’s attempt to build a general-purpose logical model of cities. The way West describes his motivations, “I’ve always wanted to find the rules that govern everything,” offers an elegant summation of why I find procedure a more compelling object of concern than process. These are the laws,… read more
To the burritos themselves!
Georgia Tech computer science PhD student Mark Nelson sends along what is surely the best piece of writing ever about ontology and burritos, Specters of Tacology. As Mark notes, I sometimes joke that after my career as a game scholar (a ludologist, if you insist) is over, I’ll take up the burrito as my subject (a field I once dubbed… read more
Finding the Friction Point
There are many charming and lurid moments in Circus Philosophicus, Graham Harman’s short, new book of philosophical myths. But this is the passage I find my mind returning to, in which Graham explains why causation is buffered: A thing does not come from the void and strike us like a meteor. This model also reflects one of the many prejudices… read more
A game to support of the Whitney's annual fund
Clickistan may be the craziest thing I’ve seen recently. It’s an abstract online art game by Ubermorgen.com, which is also and simultaneously a promotional game for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2010 annual fund. The Whitney commissioned Clickistan, which they describe like this: a work of computer game art that references early net art and classic coin-operated arcade games… read more
Call for Papers - in Athens!
It’s not often that I get to address both my philosopher friends and my game friends at once, but this is such a case. The Philosophy of Computer Games has released a call for papers for the 2011 conference, which will take place April 6-11 in Athens, Greece. I’m on the program committee this year, and I had a fantastic… read more
Paper presented at the Fourth International Conference of the Whitehead Research Project
This is a short, first version of a paper presented at the Fourth International Conference of the Whitehead Research Project, which had the theme Metaphysics & Things: New Forms of Speculative Thought. The paper explains an important difference between process philosophy and object-oriented ontology, by contrasting process with procedure. As an added bonus, the paper also coins the term firehose… read more
in Digital Media / Public Media
My program at Georgia Tech has yet another job opening, in the area of civic digital media. I hope you might apply for it, or share it with those who might be a good match. The School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology seeks applications from digital media theorist-practitioners with a Ph.D. (field open) to fill… read more
A Zero-Player Game
Can’t believe I missed this. Godville is a browser and iPhone game that bills itself as “zero-player,” because, well, play doesn’t require a player. Godville is a massively-multiplayer zero-player game (ZPG), playable in the browser. The gist of the Godville is a parody on everything from “typical” MMO games with their tedious level ups, to internet memes and ordinary day… read more
Video of my Vienna Games Conference Keynote
Earlier this fall I gave a keynote at the Vienna Games Conference, aka Future and Reality of Gaming, or FROG. The video of the talk has now been posted, and you can watch it in its entirety. The talk tries to answer the question in the title… the gist of my response is that sports videogames are variants, not simulations.… read more