Writing

I have many critics. Critics are helpful, wonderful creatures who produce as much pleasure as ire, partly because they provide amusement as often as commentary. Normally I don’t respond to the more vocally invective ones, but I’m making an exception for “videogames bitch-site” Remedial Waste. They offer the Remedial Lexicon, a list of “unsound videogame terminology.” It’s mostly vituperation sans… read more

Atari has been through a lot as a company. Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded it in 1972. They sold it to Warner Communication in 1976. Ray Kassar ran it through the crash of 1983, after which he was forced out due to accusations of insider trading. Warner split Atari into Atari Games (arcade) and Atari Consumer Electronics (hardware). The… read more

A couple months back, Speculative Heresy and The Inhumanities announced a cross-blog event for which they invited short but substantive pieces to answer the following question: â??While speculative realism has critiqued anthropocentrism in ontology, and critical animal studies has critiqued anthropocentrism in ethics, there has yet to be many productive connections made between the two. With each offering the other… read more

Am I missing something here? Oprah, who has a net worth of roughly $2.5 billion and can do whatever she wants, is crying and soul searching because she is ending her talk show so that she can restart it on her own cable network?

The Art History of Games is a three-day public symposium in which members of the fields of game studies, art history and related areas of cultural studies gather to investigate games as an art form. Speakers include me, Brenda Brathwaite, Jesper Juul, Frank Lantz, Henry Lowood, Christiane Paul, John Romero, and more. Also featured in the conference is the premiere… read more

While I’m catching up from last week’s trip to the Mobile Media Symposium at UCLA (more on that later), and this week’s new deadlines, I thought I’d drop a few CFPs for those of you who might be interested. First, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games has published a CFP for the 2010 conference, which will take… read more

The Onion reports on the planned sequel to Modern Warfare 2, an “Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks.” (thanks to Graham)

In the final Whitehead panel at SLSA this weekend, my colleague Hugh Crawford made an interesting observation about object-oriented ontology during his talk on trees. Specifically, he noted that most interest in OOO focuses on “objects” and “ontology.” But another helpful perspective can be gained from attending to “orientation.” He spent much of his talk discussing the project his honors… read more

Is there a Lacanian matheme for this?

This weekend the SLSA Conference is taking place in Atlanta, and a few things of interest to those of you who follow speculative realism are going on. For starters, I presented my keynote yesterday, on alien phenomenology. In general, the audience seemed still unfamiliar with SR and OOO, but also very curious. I took a number of useful new thoughts… read more