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September 7, 2010

Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment

circa 1979

A few years ago dynamic difficulty adjustment for videogames became a hot topic, first in the research world and then in game design too, thanks to titles like Left 4 Dead. Design novelty and technical innovation, right? As usual, not really. Here's the abstract of a patent filed 31 years ...

September 2, 2010

Art History of Games on YouTube

Videos of the Art History of Games talks are now available on YouTube. They're a bit easier to watch this way, not to mention easier to embed. The whole event was so superb, it's tough for me to pick favorites. But if I had to, I'd probably settle on talks ...

August 30, 2010

Two Books, One Summer

Alien Phenomenology and How to Do Things with Videogames

My goal this summer was to finish two books I'd been working on. By July I had some concerns, as writing wasn't coming as easily as I'd hoped, and then I got overwhelmed by the unexpected stampede of cows. But I just completed the second manuscript, and I'll admit I'm ...

August 29, 2010

Persuasive Games in Paperback

Cheaper and Floppier!

Persuasive Games is finally available in paperback! You can see it in all its perfect-bound glory at the bottom of this post. This is great news for everyone, as the paperback copy now costs a mere $12.82 on Amazon.com. If you prefer the hardcover, it's down to $23.40, and the ...

August 26, 2010

Art History of Games: Video

Go watch the awesome talks

Back in February, Georgia Tech Digital Media and SCAD Atlanta held the Art History of Games conference, which I organized along with Michael Nitsche and John Sharp. We had an amazing group of speakers as well as an opening for three commissioned games. It was unbelievably amazing in every way ...

August 19, 2010

Modernauts

Uhm, freeplay is the disruption of presence?

Finally! A way to connect the recent "Derrida Debates" to videogames! Behold Modernauts. It's inspired by the well-received Nintendo DS puzzle game Scribblenauts, in which the player solved puzzles by typing in the names of objects, which would appear for use in the puzzle. To complete it, the player would ...

August 14, 2010

Is Cow Clicker a Travesty?

On the different sorts of satire

What is Cow Clicker? Is it a satire? Yes, but it's more complicated than that: it's also a real game that people can (and as it would seem, many thousands do) play "in earnest." That's caused a number of people to ask if it ought to be taken seriously as ...

August 6, 2010

Cow Clicker Cloned!

Dip your pointer into Fish Feeder

Cow Clicker is now officially a real Facebook game. How do I know? Because it's been copied! Christian Primozich has created Fish Feeder, which takes Cow Clicker's "innovative" cow clicking mechanics and applies them to the equally common social game genre of fish fondling. You can play it here. It's... ...

August 1, 2010

Halo 2600

Ed Fries demakes Halo for Atari

Ed Fries, who used to run game publishing for Xbox, has created a demake of Halo for the Atari 2600. I'd talked to Ed about the project when I was exhibiting A Slow Year at the IGF this year, and he'd been kind enough to show me some late stage ...

July 29, 2010

Against Aca-Fandom

On Jason Mittell on Mad Men

Television scholar Jason Mittell doesn't like the television show Mad Men, and he's written an article about why. It wasn't news to me; indeed, I'm one of the interlocutors he mentions having argued with about the show on Twitter and elsewhere. I knew Jason was writing this piece and I've ...

July 26, 2010

Moos and Merch

Cow Clicker coverage and crap

I wasn't entirely prepared for the runaway success of Cow Clicker after it's release last week Indeed in the near future, I might pose the question of what counts as "success" for such a work. In the meantime, here's a quick rundown of a few of the more lively discussions ...

July 21, 2010

Cow Clicker

The Making of Obsession

I made a Facebook game about Facebook games, called Cow Clicker. You can go play it on Facebook now, or you can see some screenshots on on this site. Here's the short description, from the page just linked: Cow Clicker is a Facebook game about Facebook games. It's partly a ...

July 12, 2010

Social Games on Trial

NYU Video Game Seminar IV

Jesper Juul has been organizing videogame theory seminars at NYU. This week, I'm going to be participating in the sixth iteration of said series, "social games on trial." Aki Järvinen will take the pro-social games position, and I will fill my court-ordered role as naysayer. The official announcement appears below. ...

June 30, 2010

Plumbing the Depths

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

June 28, 2010

I felt a little like Oppenheimer

Gary Yost on Videogames

Gary Yost, creator of 3D Studio Max, on videogames in San Francisco Magazine: Several years later, Autodesk saw Yost's work and gave him a contract to start developing three-dimensional design software. That got Yost jazzed up; his father was an architect, and he loved the idea of helping to build ...

June 25, 2010

Playful & Playable

Plus yet another update on A Slow Year

My forthcoming game A Slow Year is on exhibit at a show curated by Lara Sánchez Coterón, Playful & Playable: Critica y Experimentacion con Videojuegos. It runs until September 15 at Sala Amarica, in Vitoria Gasteiz (in northern Spain). Here's a description of the exhibition, which also includes work by ...

June 19, 2010

Objects and Videogames

Why I Am Interested in Both

Like every sane person who does anything in public, I egosearch to see how people are reacting to things I'm doing. I use a few tools, but mostly Icerocket, which offers a condensed view of blog, Twitter, news, and Facebook reactions to search terms. The latter results are new, thanks ...

June 17, 2010

Cartoonist

Our Winning Project in the 2010 Knight News Challenge

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation's News Challenge award winners were announced Wednesday at MIT, and my project was among the 12 of 2,400 entries to have been awarded a grant. It's research I'm working on with my colleague Michael Mateas (UC Santa Cruz). Here's a summary of ...

June 16, 2010

The Future of News and Civic Media Conference

On Cartoonist (with Michael Mateas)

June 16, 2010

Burgertimeology

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

This is amazing. ...