My DiGRA 2009 Keynote, on Videogames and Ontology
What follows is the text of my keynote at the 2009 Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) conference, held in Uxbridge, UK September 1-4, 2009. The text corresponds fairly accurately to the address I gave at the conference. In a few cases, I’ve added some clarifications in square brackets, where additional context or commentary was relevant. Videogames are a mess So… read more
Sippable Soup
Surely someone has already made this joke, but that won’t stop me:
My Position Paper on Game Criticism, DiGRA 2009
At the 2009 Digital Games Research Association conference, I participated in a panel organized by David Thomas, “You Played That? Game Studies Meets Game Criticism.” The other panelists were William Huber, Margaret Robertson, and José Zagal. The panel posed the following question: What is game criticism? How should the academy claim its place alongside game journalism as a productive voice… read more
New Book Reviews
Some recent book reviews, one each of all my books: First, LB Jeffries wrote about Unit Operations at Pop Matters. It’s nice to see that title getting covered outside of the usual academic venues. Second, from Jennifer deWinter an extensive review of Persuasive Games, including a blow-by-blow for each section and chapter. This review is gratifying because it sits squarely… read more
What's it like? It's not important.
For some reason, my memory recently called up the 80s/90s alternative rock band They Might Be Giants. I wonder if the song “Particle Man,” from their 1990 release Flood, might not be the preemptive, unofficial theme song of speculative realism: Particle man, particle manDoing the things a particle canWhat’s he like? It’s not importantParticle man Is he a dot, or… read more
The Politics of Play in Military Video Games
Routledge has just published Joystick Soldiers, a new book about military videogames edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne. I wrote the foreword for the book, so I suppose I have to admit that my recommendation comes partly on those grounds. Still, as I wrote in the foreword, the book “both embraces and resists the role of militarism… read more
Zingone's take on a fifth law of media
I’ve been teaching Marshall McLuhan last week and today in my Introduction to Computational Media class. This year, for the first time in that class, I decided to assign excerpts from Laws of Media in addition to Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. In particular I wanted to expose my students to the McLuhans’ tetrad of media effects. It’s really the… read more
On The Human-Centered Objection
Over on Larval Subjects, Levi raised some concerns about Nate’s recent post about zombies and speculative realism. Specifically, Bryant expressed a worry that treating humans as zombies might suggest that object-oriented ontology sees humans as lesser forms than other objects, rather than as one of many objects on equal footing. As I mentioned in the subsequent discussion, I didn’t read… read more
A Translation Party with Lacan
On the heels of my recent notes on anagrams and mysticism comes a different kind of truth-generating machine, Translation Party. It’s a variation of the old telephone game, via retranslations. You enter an English phrase, and Translation Party translates it back and forth between English and Japanese until the latest English version matches the last one exactly—it calls this state… read more
More Good Blogs to Read
Two interesting blogs have come to my attention, and I thought I’d pass along the recommendation to read them. First, Nathan Gale’s An Uncanny Ontology. Gale recently wrote about zombies and ontology, which I talked about here yesterday. He’s also been working on an interesting theoretical frame for object-oriented thinking, an Object Cone. Second, Fabio Cunctator’s Hyper Tiling. The author’s… read more