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Occasional thoughts and projects. You can get a feed for my blog and writing.

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 ...

February 2, 2012

Academic Professional Job Opening

Work with me at Georgia Tech Digital Media

We have a job opening for a staff position in my program at Georgia Tech. The job is for an Academic Professional, who will serve as assistant to the Graduate Program in Digital Media. You get to work with me and nine other core faculty in the program, as well ...

January 31, 2012

Slashdot Q&A

Just a short pointer post for those who get my updates via blog or RSS. Last month Slashdot covered the Wired article about me and Cow Clicker, and invited readers to pose questions. The editors selected some, which I answered, and which Slashdot has now published. The questions were good, ...

January 28, 2012

Speculative Realism Aggregator Update

New blogs, optimized, mobile version, etc.

As promised, I've cleaned up and updated the Speculative Realism blog aggregator. Thanks to those of you who made suggestions in the comments or by contacting me directly. A few quick notes: I've added a link to the aggregator in the right sidebar, under "resources." Not sure why I never ...

January 24, 2012

On Technical Agency and Procedural Rhetoric

A quick response to Joshua McVeigh-Schulz

There's an interesting discussion over at Culture Digitally between Gina Neff, Tim Jordan, and Joshua McVeigh-Schulz on the subject of technical agency, or "how we should (re)theorize the politics of technological systems." Gina Neff's opening comments include a welcome statement about the limits of SCOT perspectives on technical systems: Within ...

January 18, 2012

Help Feed the Speculative Realism Feed

Seeking updates for the SR blog aggregator

As many of you know, for some time I've been operating an aggregator for blogs related to speculative realism. You can view post previews on this site, and there's also an RSS feed in case anybody is still using RSS readers ;) It's about time I revised and updated the ...

January 11, 2012

This is a Blog Post about the Digital Humanities

A response to Stanley Fish, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and others

For the first time in five years, I attended the Modern Language Association (MLA) conference. This is the main conference for scholars of language and literature, with about 8,000 attendees at this year's event in Seattle. Among the big things going down this year: the ongoing clash of cultures between ...

January 8, 2012

Robert Jackson's DSCOOOO1.jpg Project

At the O-Zone Journal

The new O-Zone journal has a section called OO Frequency, for content that takes a form other than writing. A while ago they posted my short video for OOOIII, Seeing Things, which deals with the photographer Garry Winogrand and the website Dear Photography. More recently, they've posted a lovely new video ...

January 5, 2012

Airplane Explanations

Some notes from in-flight

On planes, passengers lose all connection with personal and cultural history. This is why everything must be explained by flight attendants, carefully and completely yet succinctly, efficiency. To fasten your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle and tighten the strap. To release, pull the tab on the ...

January 2, 2012

Review of Bone's Restaurant

By my nine year-old

It's been a while since my daughter has offered her opinion in writing on matters of contemporary culture. No doubt you remember her reviews of TRON: Legacy, recording artist Madeline's album White Flag, and Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And if you do, you may have noticed a pattern ...

January 1, 2012

Civet Poo Coffee

A tiny review

Kopi luwak, or civet coffee, is a rare, expensive, and low-production variety of coffee. A rather unusual process is required to produce the coffee. First, the Asian Palm Civet, native to the Indonesian Archipelago, selects and eats certain wild coffee cherries. The civet consumes the cherries for their outer pulp, ...

December 26, 2011

Object-Oriented Answers

Responses to Parikka

Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media among numerous other books, recently posed a series of questions about object-oriented ontology. Levi Bryant has already responded, as has Paul Caplan, and I like both of their responses. I thought I'd offer my own here, so here goes. (The block quotes are Jussi's ...

December 22, 2011

The Virtues of Long Compiles

Thoughts on the material conditions of programming practice

I was corresponding yesterday with Jock Murphy, a Portland-based photographer, software engineer, and mobile game developer. Jock had read Racing the Beam, and we were talking about the relative differences between the 6502 and the Z80 microprocessors. This subject led us to different programming practices, a topic Nick and I ...

December 20, 2011

If the reader clicks the word "cow" then the cows will come.

Wired's online cow clicking game about Cow Clicker

As promised, I'm now linking the iPad and web versions of Wired's story on Cow Clicker. There are some interesting features of each. The iPad edition features clickable cows that moo, but the online version of the story really, uhm, sets the moood... it includes a complete Cow Clicker-themed cow ...

December 15, 2011

The Curse of Cow Clicker

In this month's Wired Magazine

Jason Tanz wrote a fantastic feature for the January 2012 issue of Wired about me and Cow Clicker. The feature includes, to use Levi's words, a centerfold of me, on a fence, in a pasture, with a cow (see below). The print issue is on newsstands now, with a web ...

December 11, 2011

A New Philosophy for the 21st Century

Briggle and Frodeman in the Chronicle

Adam Briggle and Robert Frodeman have written an excellent article for the Chronicle, A New Philosophy for the 21st Century. A stupid subscription is required, frustratingly, so let me excerpt some of the good bits for you here [update: here's a PDF]: It is time to reclaim the public role ...

November 28, 2011

Innovative Leisure Opening

Video with talks by me, Jesse Fuchs, Sonny Rae Tempest

I had previously mentioned Innovative Leisure, a show of new games for Atari I curated at Babycastles. The opening took place almost two weeks ago, but due to travel and then the Thanksgiving holiday, it's taken me this long to follow up. Thanks to Ida Benedetto, you can watch this ...

November 25, 2011

Bill Watterson on Academic Writing

Just a reminder... ...

November 22, 2011

Overly Traditional, Overly Narrow

Nick Montfort on Digital Humanities

This week my Racing the Beam co-author and platform studies series co-editor Nick Montfort spoke at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science. In addition to discussing the two new platform studies titles shipping this spring, Nick reports that he met Perry Collins, a a new program officer ...

November 21, 2011

The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies

Call for Papers

Below is the CFP for a conference to be held by the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on May 3-5, 2012. Confirmed invited speakers include me, Jane Bennett, Bill Brown, Wendy Chun, Mark Hansen, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Tim Morton, and Steven Shaviro. Hope to see you ...

November 19, 2011

Two New Interviews

Two new and relatively extensive interviews with me were recently published. The first is in Forbes, conducted by David M. Ewalt. It mostly covers material from my latest book, How to Do Things with Videogames, but there's some new material toward the end. The second interview, with Aaron McCollough, appears ...

November 12, 2011

Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing

Cover art and Blurb

Here's the cover design, tagline, and blurb for my forthcoming book Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, which will be published by University of Minnesota Press in early 2012. It's hard to express how exciting it is to have a hot wing on the cover of ...

November 10, 2011

Innovative Leisure

An exhibition of new games for the Atari

I'm curating an exhibit of new Atari games at Babycastles, which opens this Sunday, November 13th. It's called Innovative Leisure (a term I lifted from an early Atari slogan) and will take place at a new art games arcade at Death By Audio. The show exhibits games by Sonny Ray ...

November 5, 2011

McObjet a

Lacan and the McRib

Each year, the McRib returns for a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. No matter the tenor, each response's inspiration is the same: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ...

October 31, 2011

Being-Towards-Winning

Steven Connor on Winning

There are lots of great excerpts to share from Steven Connor's new book A Philosophy of Sport. Here's one: The sudden approach of the finish line involves a significant shift of effort. Instead of pushing forward, to overcome a considerable and continuing resistance, you are about to break through from ...

October 22, 2011

What's in a Medium?

A response to Mike Thomsen

The New Inquiry published a review by Michael Thomsen of my latest book How to Do Things With Videogames. It's just the kind of review an author hopes for: fair, thoughtful, based on a thorough reading, and full of new ideas and observations. I'm grateful to Thomsen for writing it. ...

October 17, 2011

The Future of Literature in an Age of Digital Media

An event at Georgia Tech this week

This Wednesday, October 19, the Wesley Center for New Media, the Georgia Tech Digital Media Program, and the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture will host a symposium on the future of literature. The event has been orgainzed by Jay David Bolter and Maria Engborg. It is free and open ...

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 15, 2011

Pearly Pixie Services Inc

A tooth fairy tool for parents

When your kids lose teeth, they may be inclined to write extensive letters to the tooth fairy, making specific requests or posing questions. While this is an endearing act to be sure, you'll want to stop short of penning a false reply. Instead, see this as an opportunity to educate your ...

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 ...

October 6, 2011

The Illusion of a Literal Description

Garry Winogrand, circa 1974

Tod Papageorge shared with me a talk Garry Winogrand gave at MIT in 1974, which he (Papageorge) introduced. An audio recording from the University of California Riverside's archive captures much of the lively question and answer period, which included a wealth of fantastic material. Here are two of my favorites: ...

October 5, 2011

A Photograph is a Photograph

Tod Papagorge on the Ontology of Photography

Apropos of two of Levi's recent posts about materialism and fictions, I thought I'd share this excerpt from an interview with photographer Tod Papageorge. He's responding to a question about the need for photography to have a moral responsibility, something Susan Sontag had suggested. It's always been puzzling to me ...

October 3, 2011

The Unbearable Lightness of Clicking

Leigh Alexander on my games

Popular game enthusiast site Kotaku just published an article by my friend and game writer Leigh Alexander, about my last two games, Cow Clicker and A Slow Year. My good friend Frank Lantz makes several appearances. I guess I'm not going to say much more about the article, except that ...

October 2, 2011

Misusing Media

A thought experiment

Lately I find myself talking a lot about contemporary "misuses" of computer media. That is, about trends that make partial use of the properties of such media, or that (in my view) mistake some less interesting, less promising, or less relevant set of properties as primary. For example: treating the ...

September 24, 2011

Notes on Loyalty

Gamification and Operational Closure

Two seemingly unrelated things happened to me yesterday, which further reflection revealed to have surprising connections. First, I spoke on a panel at the Online News Association conference about games and news. Julia Schmalz (now of Bloomberg, formerly of USA Today) and Rajat Paharia (of gamification vendor Bunchball) were the ...

September 22, 2011

Albuquerque: The Unknown

A Sony Pictures Imageworks recruitment video

Via University of New Mexico-based philosopher Iain Thomson, this recruitment video Sony Pictures Imageworks commissioned to help their Cali-bred brethren open up to the idea of moving to a new satellite office in Albuquerque. As someone who grew up in Albuquerque and worked with various divisions at Sony Pictures Entertainment, ...

September 19, 2011

Hard Clicking, Soft Clicking

More Cow Clicker on national Australian Television

I'd previously shown you Leo Burnett Sydney CEO Todd Sampson advertising a popupar Australian TV show called The Gruen Transfer, about advertising techniques, while wearing a Cow Clicker t-shirt. Here's a shot of Sampson on last week's episode, in which he proudly dons the shirt. You can watch the whole ...

September 15, 2011

Seeing Things

My talk at the Third Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium

Here's my short talk from the Third Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium (Sept 14, The New School), on the photography of Garry Winogrand. As I've already mentioned here, I had to miss the symposium because I was in China, so I submitted this short video instead of giving a presentation in person. ...

September 13, 2011

Two Brief OOO Notes

First, Levi Bryant's treatise on object-oriented ontology, The Democracy of Objects, is now available to read online. Print and PDF editions forthcoming. Congrats to Levi for its unveiling. Second, the third object-oriented ontology symposium will take place tomorrow (14 Sept) at the New School. As I mentioned earlier I'm in ...

September 10, 2011

A Tip of the Cow

Facebook likes Cow Clicker

While they've never said so in public, it seems Facebook has always been a silent fan of Cow Clicker. I've been tipped off about it several times, including via this shot of a Cow Clicker doodle on the whiteboard "wall" at Facebook HQ. A wider view of the wall cow ...

September 8, 2011

Cowpocalypse Now

The Cows Have Been Raptured

Yesterday evening, the countdown timer atop the Cow Clicker pages finally elapsed, and as per the prophesy, the cowpocalypse was summoned. Despite the players' cowllective intelligence in solving the Cow ClickARG, despite their numerous supplications to the bovine gods in response to the threat of moo-msday, nevertheless the Cowpocalypse has ...

September 2, 2011

OOOIII

At the New School

The third object-oriented ontology symposium will take place on September 14 at The New School in New York City. This event follows the first two symposia, held at Georgia Tech in April 2010 and at UCLA last December. Special thanks to McKenzie Wark for hosting it.I'll be in China that ...

August 31, 2011

El Empleo

A short film about people and objects

This a charming and fascinating short film that should be of interest to those of us interested in people, objects, technology, and related matters. (via D.E. Wittkower) ...

August 27, 2011

Cold, Grey Dirigibles

Brief thoughts on Steve Jobs's Resignation

Steve Jobs is a fascist. That's what everyone loves about him: he tells us what he wants, and he convinces us we are going to like it. And we do, not because he's right (despite popular opinion), but because it's so rare to get such definitive, brazen, top-down, abusive treatment ...

August 25, 2011

Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

Part 2: The Digital Humanities

This is the second part of a two-part essay about the humanities. Part 1 discusses some current ideas about the role of the humanities in the university and the world. Part 2 addresses the trend of the "digital humanities" in light of these observations. -ib If we accept the premise ...

August 23, 2011

Beyond the Elbow-Patched Playground

Part 1: The Humanities in Public

This is the first part of a two-part essay about the humanities. Part 1 discusses some current ideas about the role of the humanities in the university and the world. Part 2 addresses the trend of the "digital humanities" in light of these observations. -ib Recently, Stanford comparative literature professor ...

August 22, 2011

How To Do Things With Videogames

Now Shipping!

My latest book, How To Do Things With Videogames is now shipping from Amazon.com in the US. For those of you in Europe, it'll be a little while longer. And before you ask, a Kindle edition has been created and should show up Amazon any day now. The book ...

August 21, 2011

Dear Kindle Readers

A tiny rant

The following message appears on Amazon.com listings for which a Kindle edition appears not to be available. Some of the time, this means that a Kindle edition is not available. But most of the time it is a lie. Why? Because the process of publishing a Kindle edition involves submitting ...

August 18, 2011

Of Lumps, Lava, and Firehoses

Some notes on process philosophy contra object-oriented ontology

Prompted by Ben Woodard, there's been a recent flurry of posts in the philosophy blogosphere about the differences between process philosophy and object-oriented ontology. Specifically, Ben argues that thinkers of process are stuck "in the twilight of becoming" and content to allow "becoming to be utilized as an escape hatch ...

August 17, 2011

My Mooed Ring

Cowstum Skullworks

My friend Matt Maloney makes custom skull rings. Once I saw the bespoke designs he'd done, and given the knowledge of the coming cowpocalypse, I knew I had to have an artifact to document my year-long bovine madness. Matt and I met yesterday and I took delivery of the ring. ...

August 15, 2011

Variety in Videogames

On embracing videogame diversity and combatting exploitationware

In many of the reactions to Gamification is Bullshit, both in the comments on this site and in responses elsewhere, a common objection is raised. It goes something like, "you're just afraid of unfamiliar uses of games." Here's a particularly odious version of that argument, by Libe Goad on ZDNet ...

August 14, 2011

The Original Cow Clicker

On CompuServe

Yes, I know it's probably just a reference to checking stock prices (a bull market), but I choose to interpret the cow as a reference to the promised "adventure games" or perhaps even "fantastic space games." If you can read the text, you'll also note that "videotex service" CompuServe offered ...

August 13, 2011

The Problem With Every Hotel Room

...

August 8, 2011

Gamification is Bullshit

My position statement at the Wharton Gamification Symposium

(Also available in Portuguese, Japanese, and reprinted at The Atlantic and Kotaku) In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit ...

August 6, 2011

1,000,000 of Anything

On startups and small businesses

A recent article asks whether apps are just a feature, or if they are a business. Should individual creators or very small teams try to make a decent living from an app (a "lifestyle business") or should they raise venture capital and expand (a "startup"). The article cites Buffer, an ...

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 ...

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 ...

July 20, 2011

The Mooen Transfer

Todd Sampson in a Cow Clicker t-shirt

Watch this TV ad. Pay close attention around 0:23. Did you see the guy in the Cow Clicker t-shirt? Pretty crazy. I posted about this on Facebook and Twitter, but here's a bit more information about how that may have come to pass. The Gruen Transfer is an Australian TV ...

July 18, 2011

Atari VCS Programming in TextMate

An easier way to make Atari games on your Mac

Download the TextMate Atari VCS Support Installer (Mac OS X 10.5+, 60k)Several years ago I was really getting heavily into Atari VCS programming—for teaching, for art, and for research on Racing the Beam. VCS programming is notoriously hard at first, but like anything once you get the hang of it, ...

July 14, 2011

Netflix Didn't Kill the Video Store

On online video subscriptions

As you couldn't possibly have missed, Netflix announced changes to their subscription plans this week. Specifically, they separated streaming subscriptions from disc-based ones. It used to be possible to add DVD rental to a streaming subscription for $2 extra, but now you'll have to pay $7.99 more for a single-disc ...

July 13, 2011

Save the Pigs, Click a Cow

An Open Letter from Cow Clicker to Pig Assassins Worldwide

(Cross-posted from Cow Clicker) For almost a year now, Cow Clicker has helped thousands of people from dozens of countries engage in the affectionate practice of clicking a cow every six hours (or even more often). While the lamentable practice of cow-tipping may get more public attention, cow clicking ...

July 11, 2011

Low-Earth Lamentation

Reflections on the Space Shuttle Program

I am a child of the Space Shuttle era. I remember big exploded view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I remember building models of it out of plastic and assembling gliders in its shape out of foam. I remember sitting silent with my classmates watching the television news ...

July 10, 2011

Recent Interviews

It's interview season, apparently. I've done a number of interviews recently, and I figured it would be easier to link them all at once for my devoted readers enjoyment (that's you). First, Laureano Ralon published oan interview with me on Figure/Ground Communications. The interview covers the state of scholarship and ...

July 9, 2011

Luck and Destiny Irreducibly Alien

Lingis on Videogames

I would be remiss if I didn't point out the passage in The Imperative in which Alphonso Lingis discusses videogames (albeit in brief): But although we use our automobile only to roll to one end of the city and back again, transportation evokes the existence of remote and enchanted destinations ...

July 4, 2011

Social games? Boeh!

Cow Clicker in Het Parool

The Dutch newspaper Het Parool ran a story last Saturday about Cow Clicker. You can read a scan of the story below (in Dutch, click for the large version), but equally interesting to me is the fact that the paper put an enormous Cow Clicker cow on the front page ...

July 1, 2011

Revisiting Asynchronous Multiplayer Games

Me on Me on Social Games

In the autumn of 2004, I wrote a paper titled "Asynchronous Multiplay" for the Other Players Conference on Multiplayer Phenomena, which was held at IT University, Copenhagen in December of that year. To give you an idea about how long ago 2004 was on the timescale of game development and ...

June 22, 2011

A Slow Year Limited Edition

Photos of the signed, numbered set of twenty-five

I started working on my Atari "game poems" project A Slow Year almost exactly three years ago. I had spent an idle summer afternoon writing 6502 assembly on the couch, and the first versions of the summer game took form. Slowly, over time, the work revealed itself to me: a ...

June 21, 2011

The Clickness Unto Death

The Fate of Cow Clicker

This is hard to explain. Something's happening to Cow Clicker. Some months ago, evil bovine lords broke into Cow Clicker and started making demands. Their mysterious clues became the Cow ClickARG, which, Inception-like, sent up Alternate Reality Games from within the send-up of a Facebook game. Clues were scattered by ...

June 21, 2011

Enumerations

Kazemi Parses Harman's Objects

If you liked my Latour Litanizer, a tool for creating lists of objects, then you'll also like Darius Kazemi's new little gizmo, Objects that are enumerated in Graham Harman's "Prince of Networks". Here's what he did: I wrote a script to parse the original text [Prince of Networks] for things ...

June 20, 2011

The Imperative

A strange review of Alphonso Lingis's 1998 book

Jean Georges is one of four Michelin Three Star restaurants in New York city. It's very French, so French that you're just as likely to hear the language spoken as English. That and the environment in the main dining room—a single, enormous, plush chamber on the ground floor of the ...

June 17, 2011

A Slow Year Nears

Box and book preview

I'm spending this week and the start of next putting the final touches on the limited editions of A Slow Year. This involves a lot of trimming and glueing, as I'm attaching images and plaques to their final homes on books and boxes. It's hard to explain how good it ...

June 15, 2011

Fifth Annual Twittering Rocks

Prepare now for Bloomsday tomorrow

It's hard to believe, but tomorrow will mark the fifth time Ian McCarthy and I will execute our Bloomsday on Twitter performance "Twittering Rocks." (For more information, read here and here.) New this year: thanks to @francophony, you can follow all 50+ Ulysses characters via this convenient list. When we ...

June 14, 2011

A Joyboard Game Rediscovered

New Versions of lost Video Soft Titles for Atari

In the description of my Amiga/Joyboard homage game Guru Meditation, I made the following statement: As far as I know there have been no games released for the joyboard since Mogul Maniac (not counting two unreleased Amiga prototypes from the early 80s), so Guru Meditation also reminds us of ...

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 ...

June 8, 2011

Book Reviews Aplenty

In the new issue of Game Studies

A new issue of the free online scholarly journal Game Studies has just been published. Game Studies is now in its eleventh year, a fact as startling as it is encouraging. In addition to new articles on games and pragmatist aesthetics, bishōjo games, serious games, and the use of music ...

June 3, 2011

Cow Poke

Edge Magazine's Feature on Cow Clicker

The May issue of the UK-based consumer videogame publication Edge Magazine included a four-page, full-color spread about Cow Clicker, written by David Thomas. Edge is sometimes hard to find in North America, but they recently put the piece online, so you can read it there. The article is fantastic. It's ...

May 30, 2011

Writing Books People Want to Read

Or, How to Stake Vampire Publishing

Alex Reid wrote an excellent rejoinder against academic book publishing last week. The post was inspired by a discussion at the recent Computers and Writing conference about traditional publishing versus blogging and other forms of digital publishing. It's an old, perhaps even a boring topic at this point, so Alex ...

May 22, 2011

Review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams

By my nine year-old

If you enjoyed my daughter's review of TRON: Legacy, or her recent take on Athens singer/songwriter Madeline, then I know what you've been asking yourself: When will she review a film by Werner Herzog? Mercifully, the wait is over. Her review of Cave of Forgotten Dreams appears below. I don't ...

May 19, 2011

Ebooks and Print Books

What Amazon.com's ebook sales figures really mean

Among the many overzealous, under-synthesized tech business stories today, perhaps the most surprising is the news that Amazon is now selling more ebooks than print books. 105 ebooks for every 100 print books, as it happens. While 105 > 100, a more accurate but less scintillating headline might be, "Amazon ...

May 18, 2011

What do Videogames do to Art?

A response to the NEA frenzy

Last week the National Endowment for the Arts announced their new call for proposals in an "Arts in Media" category. This category, in the NEA's words, "seeks to make the excellence and diversity of the arts widely available to the American public through the national distribution of innovative media projects ...

May 15, 2011

Free-Range Games

Videogames against Cognition, against Aesthetics

The Guardian ran a story today about videogames and cognition, which covers the usual assumption that games are popular/good/whatever because they tap into some innate cognitive drive, whether it be for learning or obsession. Good games, the article concludes, are the ones that do what we want, but that we ...

May 6, 2011

Preorder My New Book

How To Do Things with Videogames, coming late August

You can now preorder my new book, How To Do Things With Videogames. It's a shortish book, about videogames as a medium. The book includes new essays as well as new versions of earlier essays, bookended by a bit-sized theoretical argument about games as a medium. Here's the blurb, followed by ...

May 1, 2011

@11ysses

Another reading of Ulysses on Twitter

Since 2007, Ian McCarthy and I have performed an act we call Twittering Rocks on June 16. It's a day otherwise known as Bloomsday, the day on which the events of James Joyce's novel Ulysses take place. Our rendition focuses on the central chapter of the book, Wandering Rocks, in ...

April 23, 2011

Mastering ATL

How to use Hartsfield-Jackson like a pro

As an expert user of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport. I thought it might be fun to share the methods I've devised for making use of the airport with minimal impact. These tips assume that you're a frequent flyer and not just a lamer leisure traveler. They also assume you're flying Delta, ...

April 16, 2011

Cathode

A terminal of yore

As someone who has worked on simulated television effects for Atari games, I was happy to learn about Cathode, a "vintage terminal emulator" for Mac. It simulates phosphor burn, screen curvature, glare, refresh rates, beam desyncrhonization, jitter, and other effects common to mini-computer terminals of yore. It's a functioning terminal ...

April 13, 2011

Newsgames Embrace Hard Complexity, not Easy Fun

A response to Paul Carr and Chris O'Brien

Cross-posted from PBS Idea Lab Earlier this month a group of journalists, game designers, and academics gathered at the University of Minnesota for a workshop on newsgames. I was there, as was fellow Knight News Challenge winner and San Jose Mercury News tech business writer Chris O'Brien. After the event, ...

April 3, 2011

Looking Busy

Newsgames and the Paralysis of Media

I'm at the University of Minnesota this weekend, where Nora Paul has organized a workshop on Newsgames. It's an excellent group, comprised of equal parts journalists, game developers, and academics. On the flight over, I read Ivor Southwood's Non-Stop Inertia. It's about the precarious nature of work in the contemporary ...

March 27, 2011

Aerotropolis

A review of the book by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay

Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next is a book with a stark premise: historically, cities have developed and thrived around transportation technologies. The present age is that of the airplane, and cities will be built for and around them. What seaports were to the eighteenth century, railroads to the nineteenth, ...

March 22, 2011

Beyond Blogs

How do scholars want to read and write?

There's been a flurry of discussion in the speculative realism corner of the blogosphere over the last week about the nature of blogging as an academic pursuit. There are more posts than I can link or summarize (a point to which I'll return), but for now, you can read Adam ...

March 19, 2011

The Cleanup Quotient

On the pleasures and pains of home dining

When dining out, there are a number of criteria by which to judge one's meal. The quality of the food, of course, and its presentation, and the service, and the ambience for certain. Perhaps the value of the experience relative to expectations, and so forth. But the stakes are different ...

March 9, 2011

Getting Real

On the Digital Humanities

Each year, the organizers of the Day of Digital Humanities ask participants the question, "How do you define the digital humanities?" Recently I browsed the many responses scholars have offered over the years. They vary widely, from simple ("Humanities by digital means") to definitive ("The application of information, computing, and ...

March 7, 2011

ADM : Heinz :: Facebook : Zynga

GDC Social Game Debate

Now that I'm back from the Game Developers Conference, I'll post some summaries of my talks. Let's start with the Are social games legitimate? debate, which moderator Margaret Robertson quickly transformed into an "Are social games evil?" debate. I was clearly the only real detractor on the panel, and I'm ...

March 3, 2011

Cow Clicktivism

Click a cow, change the world

I know what you've been thinking. Sure, I enjoy clicking cows, but what good is it doing? Is cow clicking just for fun, or can cow clicking make the world a better place? Molleindustria and Cow Clicker are pleased to announce Cow Clicktivism, a cooperative social game with real-world impact. ...

February 26, 2011

Simulating Social Shame

How Spent missed the mark

There's a nice persuasive game making the rounds, called Spent. It was made by ad agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham. The game attempts to illustrate how easily financial hardship and low income work can devolve into homelessness. It does a pretty good job, too, taking the same ...

February 24, 2011

My GDC Schedule

Debates and Rants

The Game Developers Conference takes place next week in San Francisco. Here's my speaking schedule for the event. I guess it's filled with general ire this year all around. Serious Games SummitMonday - Tuesday (all day)Ben Sawyer, Jane McGonigal, and I organize the summit, which takes place on Monday and ...

February 21, 2011

My First Cow Clicker

Are you investing in your calf's future?

By now, the virtues of cow clicking are well-known and understood. But there's a problem: Cow Clicker is bound to Facebook, and to use Facebook one must be over the age of thirteen. Are our children meant to be cooped up indoors, never allowed to romp through pastures of their ...

February 17, 2011

Mission Uncritical

Facebook and Software Architecture

I've been thinking about software architecture lately, mostly as a result of continuing to suffer at the hands of Facebook's horrific platform and API. For those who haven't tried to use it, Facebook's platform is notoriously atrocious. It's badly documented and doesn't always do what the documentation says. It breaks ...

February 10, 2011

Releasing the Cows

In order to be happy, you have to learn the art of cow releasing.

Thanks to Glenn Essex for making me aware of this important Buddhist message about cows. Releasing the Cows (Told by Master Thich Nhat Hanh) One day the Buddha was sitting in the wood with thirty or forty monks. They had an excellent lunch and they were enjoying the company of ...

February 5, 2011

The End of Conceptual Art

Lessons from iCapitalism

Whether via the lamentable trend of gamification or through the very public release of Jane McGonigal's new book, the topic of videogames' impact on the real world has been front-and-center of late. Enter iCapitalism, an iOS game that critiques both capitalism and iOS games through a simple design. As in ...

January 25, 2011

Computers are Systems, not Languages

On substituting programming languages for natural languages in the humanities

Last year I learned about a rumor swirling around the comparative literature department at UCLA, where I did my PhD. Supposedly I had managed to get C++ to count as one of the three languages required for the degree. It's not true, for the record, but it is a topic ...

January 24, 2011

RIP Jack LaLanne

Father of the first exercise videogame

Fitness expert Jack LaLanne died yesterday at age 96. He's most notable for starting the first health clubs, but anyone who lived with television in the late twentieth century couldn't have missed LaLanne's many programs and endorsements. Despite his fame, and despite the recent popularity of home fitness videogames like ...

January 20, 2011

Cowclickification

Anything you can click you can cow click!

Last year, the social gaming phenomenon Cow Clicker captured the world's imoogination, offering players the opportunity to click on a cow every six hours—or even more often. Since July 2010, more than 50,000 people have clicked over 50 breeds of cows over 5 million times, engorging their accownts with over ...

January 17, 2011

Koklickar

Cow Clicker in the Svenska Dagbladet

Here's the Cow Clicker cow displayed enormously across the culture section of the Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden's main newspaper. There's something tantalizing and disturbing about seeing the cow on newsprint. The article it accompanies can be read online, although it's in Swedish. ...

January 12, 2011

What is an App?

A shortened, slang application.

I've been thinking about this question a lot over the past year. It may sound silly given the ubiquity of the word, but despite all the "apps" on our phones and webpages and other devices, I'm not sure we have a good sense of what it means, or what that meaning ...

January 9, 2011

Press Round-Up

In lieu of a real post

I've been busy since the holidays catching up and preparing for the new term, which makes this the requisite occasional "I haven't posted on the blog" blog post. Since I've been reduced to such self-referential shame, I figured I might as well take things even further and offer my readers ...

January 2, 2011

The Best of 2010

Year of the Cow

Switched.com ran a story offering their assement of The Best Tech Writing of 2010, and my piece Cow Clicker: The Making of Obsession. I'm in good company, too: others in the top 15 include Zadie Smith, Malcolm Gladwell, William Gibson, Gary Kasparov, and the inimitable Onion. I'd never heard of ...

December 31, 2010

2010

A summary

Here's a quick link summary of my 2010, including both major events/work and smaller moments that took the form of blog posts. Happy new year, all. Disney cease-and-desist - the turtlenecked hairshirt - the Art History of Games - Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes - Heavy Rain - Pascal spoken here ...

December 30, 2010

Review of TRON: Legacy

By my eight year-old

We saw TRON: Legacy. My eight year-old daughter wrote this review of the film, which she suggested would be appropriate for blogging. If you haven't seen Tron Legacy yet please for your own good don't go see it. Because if you did then you would almost definitely die of boredom. ...

December 30, 2010

Newsgames on Kindle

Just a quick note to let you know that our book Newsgames: Journalism at Play is now available on Kindle. The price is $9.99. Its been interesting to see the increase in demand for my books on Kindle. I've had a fair number of relatively anxious requests about when this ...

December 29, 2010

Click.

More Zynga bullshit

Kyle Orland, co-author of the forthcoming book Farmville for Dummies, writes this introduction to a two-part feature over at Gamasutra, by Tadhg Kelly. The title: "How Zynga's CityVille Has Compelled 70 Million Players." Given today's surprising new interest in Cow Clicker over on Reddit, I thought I'd share some delightful ...

December 27, 2010

Awkwardness.

A review of Adam Kotsko's book

Adam Kotsko's little book Awkwardness is a pleasurable and insightful read, yet another reminder that Zero Books is quickly becoming the trusted source for short, punchy works on philosophy and cultural theory. In the book, Kotsko offers a tiny theory of awkwardness: "The tension of awkwardness indicates that no ...

December 22, 2010

Cowfight!

Two cows battle for supremacy, and you decide the victor

In celebration of Gamasutra naming Cow Clicker one of the top 5 cult games of 2010, a glorious new feature is born! Cowfight! Now two cow types can battle to supremacy. Each click counts as a vote, thus buying and clicking a cow marks a player's support. Watch your cow ...

December 19, 2010

The Secret Life of Cities

Geoffrey West and Urban Withdrawal.

There's a terrific article in today's New York Times about theoretical physicist Geoffrey West's attempt to build a general-purpose logical model of cities. The way West describes his motivations, "I've always wanted to find the rules that govern everything," offers an elegant summation of why I find procedure a more ...

December 14, 2010

Specters of Tacology

To the burritos themselves!

Georgia Tech computer science PhD student Mark Nelson sends along what is surely the best piece of writing ever about ontology and burritos, Specters of Tacology. As Mark notes, I sometimes joke that after my career as a game scholar (a ludologist, if you insist) is over, I'll take up ...

December 13, 2010

Buffered Causation

Finding the Friction Point

There are many charming and lurid moments in Circus Philosophicus, Graham Harman's short, new book of philosophical myths. But this is the passage I find my mind returning to, in which Graham explains why causation is buffered: A thing does not come from the void and strike us like a ...

December 11, 2010

Clickistan

A game to support of the Whitney's annual fund

Clickistan may be the craziest thing I've seen recently. It's an abstract online art game by Ubermorgen.com, which is also and simultaneously a promotional game for the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2010 annual fund. The Whitney commissioned Clickistan, which they describe like this: a work of computer game ...

December 9, 2010

Philosophy of Computer Games

Call for Papers - in Athens!

It's not often that I get to address both my philosopher friends and my game friends at once, but this is such a case. The Philosophy of Computer Games has released a call for papers for the 2011 conference, which will take place April 6-11 in Athens, Greece. I'm on ...

January 14, 2011

Reality is Alright

A review of Jane McGonigal's book Reality is Broken

Jane McGonigal's new book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published. The book is filled with bold new ideas and refinements of old ones. It's targeted at ...

December 5, 2010

Another Faculty Job Opening at Georgia Tech

in Digital Media / Public Media

My program at Georgia Tech has yet another job opening, in the area of civic digital media. I hope you might apply for it, or share it with those who might be a good match. The School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology seeks applications ...

December 2, 2010

Godville

A Zero-Player Game

Can't believe I missed this. Godville is a browser and iPhone game that bills itself as "zero-player," because, well, play doesn't require a player. Godville is a massively-multiplayer zero-player game (ZPG), playable in the browser. The gist of the Godville is a parody on everything from "typical" MMO games with ...

November 26, 2010

What is a Sports Videogame?

Video of my Vienna Games Conference Keynote

Earlier this fall I gave a keynote at the Vienna Games Conference, aka Future and Reality of Gaming, or FROG. The video of the talk has now been posted, and you can watch it in its entirety. The talk tries to answer the question in the title... the gist of ...

November 22, 2010

A Slow Year is Now Available

Please buy one!

I'm happy to announce that my award-winning game A Slow Year is now available for purchase. I often have the pleasure of announcing a new videogame I've made or book I've written. Today I get to do both for a single release, as A Slow Year is both a book ...

November 20, 2010

A Personal Appeal from Cow Clicker Creator Ian Bogost

We are soon entering our 6th month online, and I want to take a moment to ask you for your help in continuing our mission. Cow Clicker is facing new challenges and encountering new opportunities and both are going to require major funds. Cow Clicker is based on a ...

November 18, 2010

Los Angeles Litany

Game Design, Newsgames, Objects, and Whitehead

I'm doing a whole crap-ton of things in Los Angeles the week after Thanksgiving. First I'll be visiting Tracy Fullerton's game design class at USC on Monday. Next I'll be giving a talk on Newsgames at the USC Annenberg School, at noon on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday, I'll be participating ...

November 15, 2010

Trying to Meet

An Email Found Poem

Sounds like Thursday lunch is a bust What does everyone's schedule look like Next week? I'm also available Thursday at 3:30 Unclear, I have this other thing at 2, or 4. Tuesday 14th lunch is fine with me Wed 8 11-12 also good I currently have a meeting 12-1 and ...

November 12, 2010

Process, Place, Relic, and Escalation

My Indiecade "Project Next" Talk

In addition to getting to exhibit (and collect two awards!) for A Slow Year at this year's Indiecade festival, I was also invited to do a talk at the conference portion of the event, in a session called "Project Next." Jon Blow, Chris Hecker, Alex Neuse, Paolo Pedercini and I ...

November 8, 2010

A Slow Year Limited Editions

Let me know if you want one.

A Slow Year is about to ship, and I'll be posting information about it in the very near future. As I've mentioned before, the game will be released in two editions, both packaged as unusual books of poetry: a Windows/Mac edition running in a custom emulator, and a numbered, signed ...

November 5, 2010

Object-Oriented Feminism

At the 2010 Society for Literature Science and the Arts Conference

Last week at the Society for Literature Science and the Arts conference, Katherine Behar organized two back-to-back panels on Object-Oriented Feminism (OOF). There were six papers total, and a response to each panel by Katherine Hayles and myself, respectively. To participants, Behar posed the question, "What would a program for ...

November 4, 2010

Diskinect in the Living Room

Why physical movement games are incompatible with our homes

The Microsoft Kinect is available today, and with it come innumerable reviews of its successes and flaws (find a summary of them at Gamasutra). A common property of many negative reviews is the enormous amount of living room space Kinect requires, far more than most people will have in a ...

November 2, 2010

The Newsgames Blog

Are you reading it?

Now that you've ordered your copy of Newsgames: Journalism at Play (you did that, right?) I'd like to remind you that the Newsgames blog is full to the brim with new content. You can find it at newsgames.gatech.edu/blog. Here are some of the latest posts: Pac-Man's Political Cartoon Games Representation ...

October 28, 2010

Any Questions?

More existential art from my daughter

You may remember my daughter's talent for existential art. Here's her latest offering. Click for a larger version. ...

October 25, 2010

Jobs at Georgia Tech

Two tenure-track lines in my school

The Georgia Tech School of Literature Communication and Culture, where I work, has just announced two tenure-track job openings. I've pasted the job ads below. I hope any of you who might be interested will apply, and I encourage the rest to spread the word. Job One - Digital Media ...

October 20, 2010

Vegetamorphism

Ent as Metaphorism

I just read Ted Friedman's thought-provoking article "The Politics of Magic: Fantasy Media, Technology, and Nature in the 21st Century," about the reasons for the rise of fantasy genres in popular culture. He's currently developing this line of thought into a book (to be titled Centaur Manifesto, I believe), but ...

October 16, 2010

Promiscuous Ontologies

OOO at the RMMLA

It was particularly appropriate to come to Albuquerque to speak on object-oriented ontology with Levi Bryant and Tim Morton. Why? Well, you'll have to wait for Alien Phenomenology to understand, but it will be clear on the first page. The RMMLA was lively and fun, much unlike it's bigger brother ...

October 13, 2010

A Slow Year Wins at Indiecade

My Atari VCS game earns Virtuoso, Vanguard awards

Last week and weekend I exhibited A Slow Year, my Atari VCS game poem project, at Indiecade. The show and the conference were fantastic, and it was a pleasure to meet new friends, see old ones, hear great talks, and see great games. I was particularly happy to meet Gaijin ...

October 11, 2010

Newsgames is Now Shipping

I've had a very busy week with both GDC Online and Indiecade, following right on the heels of two other conferences back home. There's much to report, and I'll be doing so in the coming days. For now, I want to note that Newsgames is now shipping, and you can ...

October 7, 2010

Ruminations on Cow Clicker

My GDC Online Talk

Yesterday I gave my talk at GDC Online, about Cow Clicker. You can read Gamasutra's recap of it, and you might also want to read Raph Koster's thoughts. Next stop, Indiecade, where I'll be showing A Slow Year. ...

October 3, 2010

Period Pieces

Cultural Studies, circa 1995

I recently fell upon this reprint of a Lingua Franca article from 1995, "The Routledge Revolution: Has Academic Publishing Gone Tabloid?" written about Bill Germano during the golden age of cultural studies book publishing. One thing is for certain: By spotting intellectual trends ahead of the curve and responding with ...

September 29, 2010

A Slow Year Cover Art

The book jacket for my game

A Slow Year has gone to the printer at long last. I thought I'd share the jacket art. I've shown the illustration here before, but not the cover. This is the jacket for the standard edition, which will be available in trade paperback with software for Windows and Mac. The ...

September 27, 2010

Red Means Stop. So Does Rain.

Why do Atlanta traffic lights go out when it rains?

I've complained about this before in passing, on Twitter, but it's become such a major issue for my sanity that I now feel compelled to work through it. Today it's raining in Atlanta. When it rains in Atlanta, no matter how mild is the rain, the traffic lights go out. ...

September 25, 2010

What Goes on Inside Houses

Žižek on Videogames and Reality

Slavoj Žižek tends to make occasional offhand references to videogames. Here's one from an interview in New Scientist from last month (read it here instead if you don't have a subscription) And what is your take on reality? There is an old philosophical idea about God being stupid and crazy, ...

September 21, 2010

Philosophy and Simulation

DeLanda on Computation

Apparently Manuel DeLanda has a new book on philosophy and computer simulations. It's titled Philosophy & Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason, and is scheduled for release in spring 2011. Here's the blurb: In his new book, the internationally renowned Manuel DeLanda provides a remarkably clear philosophical overview of the ...

September 20, 2010

Me in Playboy

In the articles, I mean

Playboy runs a "top professors" feature in their annual college issue, and I am fortunate to be one of the twenty profs baring my intellectual gifts in the October issue, even if in brief (not in briefs though). The rest, I'm afraid, will have to be left to your imagination. ...

September 18, 2010

Metaphysics is a Subway

Philosophy as Engineering

Harman offers the following provocation over two posts this week: Building a philosophy is more like trying to build the world's best subway system than like trying to be an ascetic monk --or revolutionary, for that matter-- standing in a lofty tower and bemoaning the filth and disease of the ...

September 16, 2010

Vygotsky on Real Objects

Via my doctoral student (and Newsgames co-author) Simon Ferrari, this snippet from Lev Vygotsky's classic text Mind in Society: A special feature of human perception—which arises at a very young age—is the perception of real objects. This is something for which there is no analogy in animal perception. By this ...

September 14, 2010

Newsgames Excerpted

in The Atlantic online

Our book Newsgames: Journalism at Play should be hitting the streets in a couple weeks. If you're eager to get your hands on some of the material in advance, you'll be happy to learn that The Atlantic just published an excerpt from the first chapter, which you can read here. ...

September 11, 2010

"This Question of Language"

Derrida on September 11

In October, 2001, Giovanna Borradori conducted an interview with Jacques Derrida about the 9/11 attacks. The result was paired with a similar conversation with Jurgen Habermas, and published as Philosophy in a Time of Terror. You can read exerpts of both interviews online. I happened to read the interview ...

September 9, 2010

Quotables

Stuff I said to the Press

I thought I'd share few recent mentions of me in the media. I try not to do this with every little mention, but all of these are really good articles that you should read anyway. First, Chris Suellentrop's New York Times Magazine story Video Games that Bring Afghanistan Home. It's ...

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 31, 2010

It's This for That

The Inflation of Absurdity

A website has been making the rounds over the past few days, called It's This for That. It's one of those simple, satirical text generators, of which there are dozens by now. This one target's today's technology startups, answering the question, "Wait, what does your startup do?" with a simple ...

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 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 ...

August 24, 2010

The Magic Carpet

Notes on Glamour

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, the Academy Awards were still being held at the Shrine Auditorium, which is located just north of Jefferson, directly across the street from campus. It's quite a structure, built in the Moorish Revival style and opened in 1926. At ...

August 20, 2010

Digital Printing Won't Save Scholarly Publishing

...but a few successful books might

Via my colleague Mark Guzdial, I've just learned that Rice University Press is being shut down entirely. It's unfortunate to see a university press shuttered, but it comes as no surprise that some will fall given the perfect storm of a terrible current economic climate in both universities and in ...

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 18, 2010

The University of Stockholm Syndrome

On the "adjunct problem"

Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton's New Republic review of Louis Menand's book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand's suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school ...

August 16, 2010

DerridaGate

Or is that De(rrida)bate?

This is the post in which I point to the latest installment in the almost-infamous 2010 Derrida Debates without commenting on them: Derrida's supposed textualism, by Adam Kotso at An und für sich Realism is de rigueur, by Levi Bryant at Larval Subjects What, you didn't believe me? ...

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 11, 2010

The Sciences, The Humanities, and Design

Nelson on Cross on Design

Mark Nelson wrote up an interesting bit on design as the third discipline, in which he suggests that design is a kind of third-term offset against the old science/humanities split. Mark notes that Whitehead is a precursor to such thinking, albeit in his educational writings rather than his metaphysics: There ...

August 10, 2010

Top 10 Ways Bartenders Screw Up My Old Fashioneds

Plus, how to make one properly.

The Old Fashioned is one of a few common cocktails for me, both when I'm at home and when I'm out. However, when ordering one at a bar, the likelihood of something going mildly to terribly wrong is disturbingly high. That in mind, I present the Top 10 Ways Bartenders ...

August 9, 2010

Speculations I

A new journal of speculative realism

If you follow the speculative realism blogs you know this already, but many readers here who don't might be interested in this anyway: the first issue of the new journal Speculations has been released. The mission: "a journal of speculative realism that hopes to provide a forum for the exploration ...

August 7, 2010

On Coming Out as a Realist

Morton Joins the OOO Mafia

Tim Morton has just announced his "coming out" as an object-oriented ontologist. For those of you haven't been following Morton, he's the author of The Ecological Thought and Ecology Without Nature, and his views on an interconnected "mesh" of life forms is one you should know about. There is something ...

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 5, 2010

Non-Human Media

Interview with Eric McLuhan

Harman points to Figure-Ground Communication's interview with Eric McLuhan. It includes a question from Harman about Laws of Media, namely "why did they they the tetrad to human artifacts?" Of course, this is also the question Levi and I will pose in our planned book on McLuhan. McLuhan doesn't really ...

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 28, 2010

Weird Media and Tiny Ontology

Two Teasers

I'm behind in keeping up with my corner of the philosophy blogosphere. In part I've been distracted by cow clickery, but more so I've been spending as much time as possible writing Alien Phenomenology, which I fully intend to complete before the end of August. I'm thus offering two teasers ...

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 24, 2010

Website Updates

New stuff and new ways to get it

A few housekeeping notes this weekend. First, I've updated the Speculative Realism Aggregator to include the blogs of Jeff Bell ("Aberrant Monism) and Tim Morton ("The Ecological Thought"). If there are any other blogs that belong in the system that I'm missing, let me know. Second, you may not know ...

July 21, 2010

Cow Clicker

The Making of Obsession

Also read Wired Magazine's January 2012 feature on Cow ClickerI 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 ...

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. ...

July 9, 2010

The Mereology of Cola

On generic names for carbonated soft drinks

Harman links to this lovely map infographic of generic names for soft drinks in the United States (click below for a bigger version). It's been around for a while but is worth revisiting in light of a few points Graham makes in his post. First, Graham wonders what comprises the ...

July 6, 2010

Thank Galt I've Stockpiled

Let's Laugh at Libertarians

After a few days talking about Marxism here and elsewhere, I figured it would be good to spread my wings and pick on libertarians. Here are two specimens. First, from cartoonist Barry Deutsch comes the 24 Types of Libertarians (or click on the cartoon for a legible version at Deutsch's ...

July 4, 2010

Letting Go

The Realist Invitation and the Correlationist Imperative

A lively discussion erupted from my post on philosophy and politics of a few days ago. Among other things, commenters revisited the relationship between ontology and politics, issues OOO proponents in particular have attempted to disentangle. Among the many lengthy comments from David Rylance comes this snippet, which may have ...

July 2, 2010

There are no Blown Calls in Football

On World Cup officiating and the nature of Soccer

The topic of World Cup officiating came up in the comments on my recent Gamasutra column. I offered some thoughts there, but given the fact that the quarter final matches will start up today, it seemed worth rescuing those thoughts from the noise of web page comments. Specifically, I've been ...

July 1, 2010

Slow Media

A manifesto and blog

Given that I'm currently completing a project called A Slow Year, and given that it is, somewhat poetically, taking longer than I anticipated to finish, and given that I'm resolved to do it right rather than to do it fast, given all those things I was intrigued to learn of ...

June 29, 2010

I am not a Marxist