Videos of the Art History of Games talks are now available on YouTube. They’re a bit easier to watch this way, not to mention easier to embed. The whole event was so superb, it’s tough for me to pick favorites. But if I had to, I’d probably settle on talks by Frank Lantz and Brenda Brathwaite, which you can find… read more
The Inflation of Absurdity
A website has been making the rounds over the past few days, called It’s This for That. It’s one of those simple, satirical text generators, of which there are dozens by now. This one target’s today’s technology startups, answering the question, “Wait, what does your startup do?” with a simple this-meets-that answer. Some examples: SO, BASICALLY, IT’S LIKE ASOCIAL GAMEFORCHINESE… read more
Alien Phenomenology and How to Do Things with Videogames
My goal this summer was to finish two books I’d been working on. By July I had some concerns, as writing wasn’t coming as easily as I’d hoped, and then I got overwhelmed by the unexpected stampede of cows. But I just completed the second manuscript, and I’ll admit I’m quite chuffed to have reached my goal. The first book… read more
Cheaper and Floppier!
Persuasive Games is finally available in paperback! You can see it in all its perfect-bound glory at the bottom of this post. This is great news for everyone, as the paperback copy now costs a mere $12.82 on Amazon.com. If you prefer the hardcover, it’s down to $23.40, and the Kindle edition is now $11.54. Those prices will likely fluxuate,… read more
Go watch the awesome talks
Back in February, Georgia Tech Digital Media and SCAD Atlanta held the Art History of Games conference, which I organized along with Michael Nitsche and John Sharp. We had an amazing group of speakers as well as an opening for three commissioned games. It was unbelievably amazing in every way (here’s a summary), but until now only the attendees knew… read more
Stop it.
A week or so ago, I had a Twitter discussion with a few academics about writing pet peeves. I’d started the exchange with this simple request: Free advice to academics: if you find yourself writing “in many ways,” stop and delete it. Other suggestions followed. Alice Daer suggested “the ways in which.” Robert Jackson offered “could we not suggest that”… read more
Notes on Glamour
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, the Academy Awards were still being held at the Shrine Auditorium, which is located just north of Jefferson, directly across the street from campus. It’s quite a structure, built in the Moorish Revival style and opened in 1926. At that time, the surrounding neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles… read more
...but a few successful books might
Via my colleague Mark Guzdial, I’ve just learned that Rice University Press is being shut down entirely. It’s unfortunate to see a university press shuttered, but it comes as no surprise that some will fall given the perfect storm of a terrible current economic climate in both universities and in the book industry. But Rice UP is unique because it… read more
Uhm, freeplay is the disruption of presence?
Finally! A way to connect the recent “Derrida Debates” to videogames! Behold Modernauts. It’s inspired by the well-received Nintendo DS puzzle game Scribblenauts, in which the player solved puzzles by typing in the names of objects, which would appear for use in the puzzle. To complete it, the player would have to reach the goal, a star. Modernauts works similarly,… read more
On the "adjunct problem"
Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton’s New Republic review of Louis Menand’s book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand’s suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school should be hard because it’s supposed to “test people who… read more