Monthly Archives: January 2009

Machinima, Done Well

I have a feel­ing that most machin­ima is watched the way we watch a first piano recital, or a mid­dle school pro­duc­tion of Annie Get Your Gun When the Mac­in­tosh com­puter intro­duced desk­top pub­lish­ing (DTP) to the world in the eight­ies, one wag observed that “Now every­one can cre­ate bad design.” While we fre­quently applaud tools and tech­nolo­gies [...]
Posted in Aesthetics, Video | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

On Newsgames’ Newsworthiness

In a recent post over at the Geor­gia Tech Jour­nal­ism & Games Project (Raid Gaza! Edi­to­r­ial Games and Time­li­ness), the inde­fati­ga­ble Ian Bogost holds up a recent edi­to­r­ial game, Raid Gaza!, as exem­plary of the kind of crit­i­cal work games (“news­games”) can do for journalism. Like edi­to­r­ial games should, [Raid Gaza] takes a strong posi­tion. But [...]
Posted in News, Politics, Rhetoric | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Unintended Nostalgia Delays Revolution

Win­ston Churchill once observed that first, we make our build­ings, and then they make us. By which he meant, quite sen­si­bly, that the spaces in which we live and work con­di­tion and deter­mine our behavior. With Mario Car­Barn, our desire was to reap­pro­pri­ate the space, if ten­ta­tively, on behalf of the ludic. The Sit­u­a­tion­ists were famous [...]
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Badiou and Theatre

In The Hand­book of Inaes­thet­ics, Alain Badiou assem­bles ten “The­ses on The­ater,” which, at first glance any­way, offer game stud­ies some com­pelling par­al­lels. Indeed, he begins gen­er­ously, fur­nish­ing us with the very link that we require. The pur­pose of the the­ses? “To estab­lish—as we must for every art—that the­ater thinks” (72; empha­sis mine). In [...]
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Be All You Can Be (For A Quarter, To Start)

Today’s New York Times fea­tures a brief arti­cle on video games and U.S. Army recruit­ing efforts in a Philadel­phia mall. The facil­ity, which opened in August, is the first of its kind. It replaces five smaller recruit­ment sta­tions in the Philadel­phia area, at about the same annual oper­at­ing cost, not count­ing the ini­tial expenses, said Maj. Larry [...]
Posted in Politics, Rhetoric | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The News from Nielsen

For Decem­ber, among Amer­i­can gamers who play War­craft, Nielsen finds it played on aver­age over 11 hours / week. Years ago, I was a “Nielsen fam­ily.” The unwieldy set-top box, hard-wired into the TV and the Cable Box, was a mys­te­ri­ous, excit­ing pres­ence, and leant an air of author­ity to my cable TV watch­ing choices (how­ever [...]
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