I'm sure you've been biting your nails in anticipation
A week ago or so, I mentioned a trivia contest I was running on the Touch Arcade forums, with correct answers winning Guru Meditation redemption codes or a signed copy of Racing the Beam. I’ve given away all the codes and the book, so now it’s time to share the correct answers. (1) The Fairchild Channel F, an interchangeable cartridge… read more
A universal plot summary, summer 2009 edition
It’s time to test my theory of computer animated film plots against the latest examples of that form, DreamWorks’ Monsters vs. Aliens and Pixar’s Up. In case you are too lazy to click through, here’s the theory again in its entirety: After the worst of a long series of well-meaning but destructive deeds, an anthropomorphized creature protagonist is shunned by… read more
For those attending E3, my game Guru Meditation will be shown at the IndieCade exhibit, which can be found in South Hall, booth #652. Unfortunately I won’t be there to see reactions to it. If you do, please let me know about them!
In Digital Culture & Education
Thomas Apperley has written a new review of Racing the Beam in the new open-access peer-reviewed journal Digital Culture & Education. Nick and I are delighted to see a review of our book in the inaugural issue. I was likely delighted to see Apperley trace the steps toward the platform studies project in my earlier writings: The gestures towards a… read more
On cognitive dissonance and the iPhone. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
Last month I took an early Sunday morning flight from Atlanta to Orlando. I wandered into a newsstand and picked up the May 2009 issue of Popular Science, which featured a cover story about space planes that intrigued me. The story turned out to be less interesting than the cover suggested, but I rather enjoyed another article about the discomfort… read more
Win copies of Guru Meditation, Racing the Beam
The nice folks over at Touch Arcade invited me to drop in and discuss my game Guru Meditation on their forum. To spur conversation, I decided to run a little trivia contest. I figured I’d point the rest of you to it. Here’s how it works: the first person to correctly answer any single question gets an iTunes redemption code… read more
The NSF Prefers Strings, Crayons
After an unintentional hiatus, last week I resumed following Georgia Tech CS colleague Mark Guzdial’s Amazon blog. His latest salvo is a thought-provoking piece called Using computing to teach computing (Hint: Don’t use the “P” word). The post centers around a question Mark posed to Jeannette Wing, Director of the Computing & Information Science & Engineering branch of the NSF… read more
Om for Atari and iPhone
After two years of off and on development, I’ve just released my relaxation game Guru Meditation, simultaneously for Atari VCS and iPhone. The game is a re-imagining of and homage to old Amiga lore, an exploration of what a game that legitimately deals with inactivity would feel like, and (through the iPhone version), an exploration of attention and compromise in… read more
Notes on Nick Montfort
Two quick notes relating to friend and Racing the Beam coauthor Nick Montfort. First, he has a new blog, Post Position, which already boasts a number of insightful posts on games, IF, constraint, and other topics that will probably interest you if you are reading my site. Second, as Nick noted in passing in one of his post positional posts,… read more
The Insane Japanese Response to Swine Flu
A week ago, I wrote about the irrationality surrounding so-called swine flu, in the context of Killer Flu, a videogame Persuasive Games created about seasonal and pandemic flu. This week, I received an unexpected email from the organizers of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, which is scheduled to take place in Tokyo next week. Apparently the Japanese… read more