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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 25, 2010

Academic Mumblespeak

Stop it.

A week or so ago, I had a Twitter discussion with a few academics about writing pet peeves. I'd started the exchange with this simple request: Free advice to academics: if you find yourself writing "in many ways," stop and delete it. Other suggestions followed. Alice Daer suggested "the ways ...

May 23, 2010

Rorty Roundup

Summaries, Papers, and Blogs

An update on the aftermath of last week's Rorty conference. First, organizer Liz Losh has posted detailed accounts of all the sessions on her blog: Part 1, archives Part 2, data Part 3, philosophy Part 4, public intellectualism Part 5, rhetoric Part 6, closing I spent part of last week ...

May 18, 2010

We Think in Public

Paper presented at "Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't: In Memory of Richard Rorty"

May 6, 2010

The Picnic Spoils the Rain

On "Heavy Rain" and interactive cinema. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

March 30, 2010

How to Speak in Public

Me and Harman on Giving Lectures

After an email conversation he and I had, Graham offers some thoughts on the best way to give talks. Here was my original off-the-cuff thought: One of the lessons I’ve learned in the past five years is that there is no right way to give a talk. There are, however, ...

March 29, 2010

Mario on the Dole

The adult future of your favorite game characters

Here's another fun excerpt from the forthcoming Newsgames book, from the chapter on "Platforms." Once the playthings of children, characters like The Legend of Zelda’s Link and Super Mario Bros.’ Mario are now blank canvases ready to accept adult scenarios like political scandal, insurance fraud, dysfunctional health coverage, spousal abuse, ...

March 15, 2010

Play With Us

My GDC 2010 Microtalk

March 3, 2010

Shell Games

On the achievementalization of the world. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

February 28, 2010

Philosopher Slab Poems, in Pixels and Letters

Also, win a copy of a book I haven't yet written

Sometimes serious ideas emerge from the strangest places. Last week Harman tossed an offhand question onto his blog: Who is the most overrated philosopher?. It sparked quite serious discussion all over. So serious that before long, Harman found himself wondering if an anthology of opinions on "overrated philosophers" could indeed ...

February 10, 2010

Check-Ins Check Out

On check-in mechanics and games as loyalty programs. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

February 9, 2010

Information is Beautiful

...but it's not necessarily informative

My next book, Newsgames: Journalism at Play (co-authored with my graduate students Simon Ferrari and Bobby Schweizer), is being prepared for publication, and it should hit the streets in late summer of this year. In anticipation, I'll try to offer some occasional previews of the content we cover in the ...

December 30, 2009

Writing for Readership

Making books appealing

Harman offers his thoughts on the virtues of short books, with a mention of the conversation he and I had in Cairo about the constraints of the Atari and how they relate metaphorically to book authoring. The flavor of the genial teasing seems to be "haha, getting lazy there, aren't ...

December 23, 2009

Puzzling the Sublime

Abstract puzzle games and the mathematical sublime. From my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra.

December 22, 2009

Speculations Journal

Announcement and Call for Papers

Thanks to the work of Paul John Ennis, a graduate student at University College, Dublin, there is now a new online, open-access journal for speculative realism: Speculations: The Journal of Object Oriented Ontology. Here's a blurb about the project: Speculations is the journal of object oriented ontology. We hope to ...

December 14, 2009

Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers

Paper written with Nick Montfort for Digital Arts and Cultures 2009

November 27, 2009

The Legume, the Piston, and the Bearded Man

My Contribution to the Speculative Heresy/The Inhumanities Cross-Blog Event

November 16, 2009

The Papers are Calling

Or is it the other way around?

While I'm catching up from last week's trip to the Mobile Media Symposium at UCLA (more on that later), and this week's new deadlines, I thought I'd drop a few CFPs for those of you who might be interested. First, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games has ...

A Slow Year

A chapbook of game poems for Atari VCS, PC, and Mac

October 18, 2009

Now You Can Burn My Books

Thoughts on Kindle and electronic editions

Apparently my publisher has started issuing Kindle editions of my books. Two are now available in Amazon's electronic format: Persuasive Games and Unit Operations. Readers might be interested to find that MIT Press seems to have taken up a different strategy with their electronic book pricing. Specifically, the Kindle editions ...