Courtesy of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, I bring you a cartoon comparing scientists, philosophers, and engineers. It speaks for itself, of course, but I’ll make two observations about it nevertheless. First, the cartoon thinks it’s mocking scientists and philosophers, but when I read it, it’s the engineer who looks like the idiot. Second, the philosopher panel offers a particularly efficient… read more
Updated Screenshots and Trailer
As the IGF approaches, I have a few updates to relate about A Slow Year. First, expect to see a number of interviews with me about the game emerging over the next two weeks. The first is on Rock Paper Shotgun, and I’ll report back when the others drop. My favorite line from the RPS piece, “I hope the game… read more
The Stuff of Things is Many
The past few days have witnessed a flurry of comments on the use and misuse of “materialism” in philosophy, starting with Gratton and continuing with Harman (1, 2) and Bryant. Gratton hits the nail on the head when he asks, “What kind of material would we even be talking about?” Indeed, it’s become increasingly difficult to understand from what material… read more
Learning about Learning Programming from the Apple ][
Among the many, many things we talk about when we discuss curriculum for the Computational Media degree is how to make learning programming facile and appealing all throughout a student’s career. Many sub-problems arise, for example, how can one help students learn new languages and environments after they’ve become familiar with one or two? Just after having some of these… read more
Hacking Freeway
Today in my Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes class we talked about disassembling binaries and doing graphical hacks. These are the simplest kind of ROM hacks to do, as they only require changes to data in the disassembly, which is usually relatively easy to find and identify. My in-class example involved hacking David Crane’s Activision title Freeway. My simple hack… read more
from Videogaming Illustrated, October 1982
One of my students found a bunch of old computer and videogame magazines and shared them with me last week. I’ve been slowly perusing them as time allows, and I found something surprising in the October 1982 issue of Videogaming Illustrated. It’s from a multi-page feature called Star Words, in which different celebrities, mostly actors, offer their impressions of videogames.… read more
What the Wall Said
One of my students found and snapped this plaque at last week’s Art History of Games symposium. When mounted in an art museum like the High, an inscription this strives to remind its visitors that they stand above the artifacts held hostage in the galleries, despite the apparent attention paid to (and the incredible sums paid for) those artifacts. It… read more
On check-in mechanics and games as loyalty programs. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
I am one of those frequent flyer freaks. I count my elite qualifying miles and plan trips to maximize their accrual. I orchestrate complex bookings based on the class of service available and my ability to upgrade it. I can tell you which seats are optimal on a Delta 767-300 versus a 767-400. I can explain the intricacies of award… read more
...but it's not necessarily informative
My next book, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (co-authored with my graduate students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), is being prepared for publication, and it should hit the streets in late summer of this year. In anticipation, I’ll try to offer some occasional previews of the content we cover in the book. One of the chapters in Newsgames covers infographics, exploring… read more
Day 2 and Exhibition Opening
We’re already into the third and final day of the Art History of Games symposium, and as an organizer I haven’t even tried to blog the talks. You’re best bet is to check out coverage online (Gamasutra covered part, but not all, of yesterday’s sessions), or to review the Twitter stream on hashtag #AHoG. Last night’s exhibition opening was great;… read more