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May 8, 2013
Object Lessons is coming...
A teaser for a new project
I've been working for months on a new writing and publishing project that continues and extends my interest in thinking and writing about things. Here's a teaser: objectsobjectsobjects.com. Want more info? Wait for the official announcement and full website, or just ask! ...
March 19, 2013
Carpentry vs. Art: What's the Difference?
A preview of an answer that might be forthcoming
Shortly after Alien Phenomenology was publsihed, Darius Kazemi asked: what's the difference between carpentry and art? Carpentry, for the record, is my name for the philosophical practice of making things, of which articles and books are but one example. I borrowed and expanded the term from the ordinary sense of ...
February 22, 2013
PlayStation 4: A Videogame Console
Today, the most novel feature of new technology is ordinariness.
October 1, 2012
Pretty Hate Machines
A Review of Patrick Crogan's Gameplay Mode in Game Studies 12:1
August 26, 2012
An Increasingly Ordinary Affair
The office work of research
Partly responding to my recent post on ideas versus their commercialization among writers and intellectuals, I came across this excellent and tragic paragraph on the state of intellectual work in this post: ‎Meanwhile, academic life is becoming an increasingly ordinary affair, a job in which you hurry from task to ...
August 22, 2012
Speaking of Fees...
The facile scourge of paid speaking
Writing for Esquire, Stephen Marche writes about The real problem with Niall Ferguson's letter to the 1%, which amounts to "paid speaking gigs." Here's the money quote: Ferguson's critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as ...
July 18, 2012
Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Platform Or Reality Show?
It's QVC for the web generation, the new Thunderdome, Off Track Betting for ideas addicts. Whatever you call it, Kickstarter's becoming less about funding widgets than pouring gas on creative sparks just to watch them ignite.
July 16, 2012
The Great Pretender
Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation
May 7, 2012
Rocks are Rocks
Response to "Aliens, but definitely not as we know them"
I received a great email response to my recent New Scientist column on alien phenomenology. I thought I'd share a part of it anonymously just because it felt so shareworthy. Rocks are rocks. They are rocks in relation to humans, and they are rocks in relation to birds and they ...
March 15, 2012
A Portrait of The Artist as a Game Studio
The style of thatgamecompany
February 8, 2012
Making Books
It's not the same as writing books
Back when his book The Textual Life of Airports was published in December, Christopher Schaberg reported what most authors do: seeing his book for the first time. "What a weird feeling," Chris wrote. "It resembles an object from outer space. Vaguely recognizable, yet totally alien at the same time."This is ...
November 25, 2011
Bill Watterson on Academic Writing
Just a reminder... ...
October 16, 2011
Saying Something
Steven Johnson on Derrida
The author Steven Johnson has an essay in the New York Times today, I Was an Under-Age Semiotician, about his younger years as a Semiotics major at Brown. It's worth a read for anyone who did or still does philosophy or "critical theory," to use an annoying term. But I ...
October 10, 2011
Frequent Flight
An essay on flying for AirplaneReading.org
October 10, 2011
Frequent Flight
My contribution for airplanereading.org
Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich have written a lovely little book called Checking in/Checking Out, about air travel. It's a two-sided book meant to be read from both ends. Schaberg's side is about his experience working for United in Bozeman, Montana, and Yakich's is about his attempts to overcome ...
August 4, 2011
Talking, Writing, Publishing
Some August miscellany
I've been busy dealing with administrative preparations for the start of the fall term, and finishing up a couple of summer projects. I have a bunch of blogmatter in the hopper, but in the meantime, here's a few recent bits and pieces of mine that you can find elsewhere: I ...
August 2, 2011
From Aberrance to Aesthetics
On diversity in games. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.
July 27, 2011
Concealment and Fear
David Foster Wallace on "Academic English"
In comments to my response to Geoff Dyer's critique of academic writing, Bill Coberly suggested that "a lot of the tolerance for lousy writing in academia does come from that (probably unconscious) desire to keep academia sacred and mysterious." There's probably something to this. On a related note, the faslanyc ...
July 24, 2011
A Sorrow Blind to Itself
On Bad Writing and Isolationism in the Humanities
In Friday's New York Times, the novelist and essayist Geoff Dyer wrote a scathing indictment of academic writing. An Academic Author's Unintentional Masterpiece takes aim at the well-known art historian Michael Fried, but it could easily have been written about almost any scholar in the humanities, veteran or novice, successful ...
June 9, 2011
Write a Platform Studies Book
...and secure your fame and fortune forever*
Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that ...
