Writing

Videogame Snapshots

How games can be informal and personal. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra

In the late 19th century, photographs were primarily made on huge plate-film cameras with bellows and expensive hand-ground lenses. Their operation was nontrivial, and required professional expertise. The relative youth of photography as a medium made that expertise much more scarce than it is today. All that changed when Kodak introduced the Brownie Camera in 1900. The Brownie was different.… read more

I am a Joker

In the Drift Deck at Conflux 2008

No, literally. Julian Bleecker and Dawn Lozzi created the Drift Deck, an (analog) algorithmic puzzle game used to navigate city streets, inspired by the Situationist International. They’ll be exhibiting and playing it at the Conflux 2008 Festival in New York next week, Sept 11-14. I was invited to pen a composition for the deck, which appears on the verso of… read more

Ophelia joined the group Maidens Who Don’t Float

Hamlet on Facebook

Ian McCarthy just showed me I was happy to learn of Sarah Schmelling’s version of Hamlet in Facebook newsfeed form. You can read it over at McSweeney’s. Given my interest in Facebook and in adapting literature for the computer, I found it particularly nice to see how Schmelling’s Hamlet made deft use of the conventions of Facebook news feeds in… read more

Ordinary Olympians

Why athletic excellence alone cannot be appreciated

My sister-in-law Susannah is a world-class gymnast. Despite the fact that her event, tumbling, is much, much more atheletic and arresting than plain old artistic gymnastics, it didn’t make the cut even for exhibition at the Beijing games. That may have something to do with China’s weak performance in the sport. In any case, she didn’t get to go this year.… read more

The Geek’s Chihuahua

A Review of the iPhone

Despite attempts to maintain my geek cred, despite my propensity for gadgeteering, despite my favor for the cult of Apple, despite my lust for shiny things with microprocessors, I didn’t get an iPhone when it first came out earlier this year. Indeed, I also didn’t get one when the new versions were released this month. It’s not that I wasn’t… read more

Videogames, circa 1920

Today Tristan (age 8) and I took a break from Wii Play to enjoy some NES Ice Hockey, thanks to a Wii Virtual Console download. After we were done playing, I asked him what he thought of the game. He liked it; it was simple and he successfully figured out how to play quickly enough to be a good competitor.… read more

The End of Gamers

Things people do with videogames

Think of all the things you can do with a photograph. You can document the atrocities of war, as photojournalists sometimes do. You can record fleeting moments in time, as did documentarians like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. You can capture the ordinary moments of family life, as many people do at birthday parties or holidays for an album or… read more

Learning from Amazon Associates

Referral reports and privacy, insight, surprise

Like many, I use the Amazon Associates affiliate marketing program when linking to books and some other products from my websites. It’s a simple referal service. Users can create links and when readers on their websites follow those links and make purchases, Amazon pays a referral fee. There are lots of ways to use the Associates service, but I mostly… read more

My Platform Studies Talk

from the Software Studies Workshop

I attended the Software Studies Workshop at UCSD back in May, where I gave a talk on platform studies, the subject of a new book series co-edited by Nick Montfort and me. The first title in the series will be our book on the Atari VCS. The UCSD crew has put all the talks from the workshop online at YouTube.… read more

Every Computer Animated Film Ever

A universal plot summary

After the worst of a long series of well-meaning but destructive deeds, an anthropomorphized creature protagonist is shunned by his community. He enters into a series of adventures in the pursuit of a seemingly impossible task to prove his worth. During this pursuit the protagonist meets a rival and, to the former’s surprise, they have more in common than not.… read more