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June 30, 2010

Plumbing the Depths

On the familiar and the unfamiliar in games. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

June 16, 2010

Burgertimeology

You've just thrown away a lot of points, and a lot of peppers

This is amazing. ...

June 8, 2010

The Spring Handhelds

Apple and the Rhetoric of Change

Now that yet another Steve Jobs keynote is over, I find myself more interested in what Apple was saying about itself than what others are saying about its new gadgets. Despite my apparent pique pommaire, I like Apple stuff. I do my computing on a Mac and I have an ...

May 1, 2010

Hildegard ate most of the tacos!

Mereology and the Partitive Plural

Levi Bryant has written a drove of meaty new posts in the past couple days. There's one about his blue mug, one about entanglement, one that asks if eclipses are objects, and one about ideology. But it's his post about strange mereologies that I want to point you to today. ...

January 2, 2010

Please Stand Clear of the Closing Rights

How Disney and Zazzle conspire against me (and you)

I've reported twice on my experience selling things on Zazzle, the custom on-demand online print service for apparel and paper goods. First, just over a year ago, I mentioned the t-shirt designs I had made to riff on the Disney World monorail announcer notice, "Por favor manténgase alejado de las ...

December 10, 2009

Eight Bit Me

Promotional Materials for Think Inside the Box

Nick Montfort and I are giving a lecture tomorrow (Friday) at UC Irvine, as a part of the Center for Computer Games & Virtual Worlds lecture series. The talk, held at 4pm in Donald Bren Hall, covers aspects of Racing the Beam and platform studies. All of that's just context ...

December 9, 2009

Panic for Atari

Broken dreams and cool boxes

Panic Software, who makes Mac utilities like Transmit (an FTP client) and Unison (a USENET client), has created a set of hypothetical boxes and watercolor box art, as if their apps had been made for the Atari 2600. You can buy them online. They are insanely awesome. ...

October 12, 2009

Disney: We Own the Concept of the Castle

Fun with Infringement

Almost a year ago, I wrote about my modest success selling t-shirt designs on Zazzle.com that artfully depict the Disney World monorail announcer's characteristic Por favor manténgase alejado de las puertas. In that piece, I also drew attention to the ways products like this exert fandom by commercially exploiting holes ...

August 2, 2009

Tantrum Capitalism

Thoughts on Skype and Ebay

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 ...

July 11, 2009

Engineering the Closet

How personal manufacture fixed my wardrobe woes

Like many homes in what we locals call "in-town" Atlanta, mine is an older one, built over half a century ago. There are many charms and challenges that come with owning an older home, but it's the unexpected trials that prove the most onerous. One of the unusual features of ...

June 4, 2009

Guru Meditation Trivia Contest Answers

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 ...

May 18, 2009

Guru Meditation Released

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 ...

May 4, 2009

Top Ten Reasons I Returned My Kindle

This week has witnessed much talk about Amazon's possible release of a new, larger Kindle eReader designed for newspapers and textbooks, culminating in an article in the New York Times that claims confirmation of such an impending announcement. That's on top of talk from magazine publisher Hearst's announcement that it ...

February 21, 2009

Boil Me Elmo

A product concept

Who wouldn't buy one, I ask you? Just imagine how the whistle would sound. ...

December 18, 2008

Por Favor Manténgase Alejado de las Puertas

Fandom and Detritus

One of my gripes with Henry Jenkins's book Convergence Culture was its tendency to privilege pop cultural fan activity to other sorts of attention. Appealing though they may be, I wondered if Harry Potter and Survivor really sat at the pinnacle of human creativity in the way that the ...

November 16, 2008

Carrying On Over Carry-Ons

A Review of the Tom Bihn Checkpoint Flyer

For years now, it has been necessary to remove laptops from carry-on bags for inspection at airport security here in the States. The TSA imposes this requirement to insure a clear view of the internal components of some electronics. Scanning a laptop separately allows security personnel to insure that a ...

October 25, 2008

Credit Crisis Pumpkin

From this year's Fiscal Fright jack-o-lantern series

I present the next installment of this year's financially-themed jack-o-lanterns. First we had Mortgage Meltdown. Now I humbly offer Credit Crossbones. This one is a bit more subtle, perhaps, than the last. You get it though, right? ...

October 19, 2008

Mortgage Meltdown Pumpkin

From this year's Fiscal Fright jack-o-lantern series

Jack-o-lanterns are serious business in my house. Yet, I knew it was going to be hard to top last year's excellent Jack McCoy-o-Lantern. A political theme was possible, but it's been done, and I'm hardly the kind to print a template from a website. So, we settled on a different ...

October 10, 2008

Play-Doh Palin

Sculptures from Meaningful Play

Greetings from the the Meaningful Play conference at MSU. This morning, Leigh Anne Cappello from Hasbro spoke about toy design. Hasbro brought packages of Play Doh for every table, and Leigh encouraged us to make things during the talk. So, I made a Play Doh Sarah Palin. It's not nearly ...

August 2, 2008

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 ...