Writing

Over at Un-canny Ontology, Nathan Gale writes a post that responds to and extends both mine on Harman’s conception of cuteness and Bryant’s on the unheimlich. The uncanny valley rears its head, a concept originally developed by Masahiro Mori about the moment when robots cease to seem realistic and begin to seem creepy. It’s an often-cited concept in videogames, and… read more

Via Graham Harman, I discovered the “best name anagram” generator, which does exactly what it sounds like. For example, Graham Harman’s anagram name is HA HA! GRR! MAN AM You may have seen it too, since the site makes it easy to post one’s name anagram on Facebook, so anagrams have been making the rounds. For me, the generator suggests… read more

I’ve just closed Water Cooler Games, the blog about “videogames with an agenda” that Gonzalo Frasca and I started in 2003. I have also archived the site in its entirety here on Bogost.com, and all existing links to pages on watercoolergames.org will forward correctly in perpetuity. When Gonzalo and I first started Water Cooler Games, the very idea of “videogames… read more

Today John Sharp showed me this insanely cute dwarf miniature horse, named Koda. He’s about as big as a cat, so noticeably smaller than a normal miniature horse because he is, well, a dwarf. Click for a bigger image, or see more pics here. One of my favorite sidetrips in Graham Harman’s Guerilla Metaphysics (back in print soon) is his… read more

Graham Harman mentions Manuel DeLanda’s new book, which boasts a title that should intrigue anyone reading this website: Philosophy, Emergence and Simulation. Here’s a three-minute video of DeLanda talking about it a bit more. It sounds like the book is mostly about animal intelligence, with the connection to simulation having to do with the way different intelligence other than the… read more

We just rejoined Netflix after several years away from it. While recreating preferences and ratings on a fresh account, we noticed something surprising: Netflix doesn’t allow a user to judge things as “just ok.” Take a look at the tool-tip explanations for their five-star ratings: Netflix’s recommendation system is generally considered its most valuable asset, so much so that the… read more

Two key conferences in digital media and game studies, Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) and the Digital Games Reserch Association (DiGRA) use an unexpected format for their papers: ACM, the format devised by the Association for Computing Machinery for publications in computer science. I have nothing against computer science, but the use of ACM format is bad and dumb for… read more

Over at Larval Subjects, Levi Bryant discovered Conway’s Game of Life. Later, responding to John Doyle’s comments, Braynt reflected on the ontological status of the game and its objects. Says Levi: there are not two worldsâ?? one consisting of the really real or “mind-independent objects” and another consisting of mind and the social â??but rather only one world, the real,… read more

If you follow technology news—or even if you don’t—you couldn’t have missed this incredible story about Skype. Apparently when Ebay bought Skype for $2.6 billion back in 2005, they didn’t acquire all of the latter’s core product. Specifically, Skype’s founders sheltered key peer to peer subsystems for the service in another company, Joltid, which has been licensing the technology to… read more

Paul Ennis has been publishing interviews with a number of contemporary thinkers working in and around the area of speculative realism, on his website Another Heidegger Blog. So far, participants have included Lee Braver, Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, Adrian Ivakhiv, with Jeffrey Malpas to come this week. I was honored to be included among the group, and Ennis has just… read more