Author Archives: Garrison

Boing Boing: Games To Get

I’ve just dis­cov­ered Boing Boing’s ongo­ing “Games to Get” series, a great col­lec­tion of (mostly) indie stu­dio games for var­i­ous plat­forms. Many of my lat­est obses­sions are there: Plants vs. Zom­bies, Chime, Clash of Heroes, Drop 7. Def­i­nitely worth reviewing.
Posted in Reviews, games | Tagged , | Leave a comment

CFP: Digital Game Play as Sociotechnical Practice | HASTAC

HASTAC (The Human­i­ties, Arts, Sci­ence, and Tech­nol­ogy Advanced Col­lab­o­ra­tory) is def­i­nitely worth get­ting to know: I’ve been to two of their con­fer­ences, and they are ter­rific. Today, their blog calls atten­tion to a new Call For Papers (Trento, Italy, Sept 2010) that is inter­est­ing chiefly for its desire to blend game stud­ies with STS: CFP: [...]
Posted in Conferences, Scholarship, Technology, games | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Course of Empire

Update (7 Feb): For a sketch of the Hait­ian infor­ma­tion infra­struc­ture, check out Michael Deibert’s post from Slate, Hait­ian Radio Returns to the Air. Orig­i­nal Post I won­der how oth­ers feel about this newly-listed MIT Media Lab course (spring 2010). On the one hand, there’s a lot here to be admired: The course is clearly [...]
Posted in Courses, Politics, ethics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Jürgen Habermas (JHabermas) on Twitter

Update: Accord­ing to @JohnathanStray, the Haber­mas account was a ruse. I’ll bet Rhein­gold is rolling his eyes. So, this is fun. Jür­gen Haber­mas (JHaber­mas) on Twit­ter.
Posted in twitter | Tagged | Leave a comment

Kirschenbaum’s Simulations Course at UMD

Matthew Kirschen­baum, over at UMD, is an Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish and the Asso­ciate Direc­tor of MITH, the Mary­land Insti­tute for Tech­nol­ogy in the Human­i­ties. His blog is chock full of inter­est­ing stuff, and his tweets are prolific. A year ago, he pub­lished a good lit­tle arti­cle in the Chron­i­cle on why human­i­ties stu­dents must [...]
Posted in Courses, Humanities, Scholarship | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Thesis Tweetstream

In addi­tion to my work on games, play, and vir­tual worlds at The Pro­gram in Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, Cul­ture, and Tech­nol­ogy, I am for­tu­nate enough to coor­di­nate the under­grad­u­ate senior sem­i­nar in Amer­i­can Stud­ies at George­town. It’s a fan­tas­tic job. One of the goals of my work with these stu­dents is to find novel ways [...]
Posted in Courses, Georgetown, Humanities | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Neophyte Takes on the Command-Line Interface

This has been cov­ered in a few places, includ­ing Hyper­com­pen­dia and East­gate’s use­ful HTLit.com, but it’s worth men­tion­ing again. Dig­i­tal lit­er­acy scholar Den­nis Jerz set his eleven-year-old child in front of Colosal Cave Adven­ture and — using a piece of soft­ware like Screen­flow — cap­tured both the unfold­ing of the game on-screen and the young gamer’s inter­ac­tion [...]
Posted in Literacy, Scholarship | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Syllabus: Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes

Now here is a class from which we could all learn something. Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes: Spe­cial Top­ics in Game Design and Analy­sis, Spring 2010. Geor­gia Insti­tute of Technology. Hacks are works pro­duced by mak­ing mod­i­fi­ca­tions to exist­ing games by dis­as­sem­bling bina­ries, ana­lyz­ing the mean­ing and pur­pose of the result­ing source code, iden­ti­fy­ing desir­able [...]
Posted in Courses, Technology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment