Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience “Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.” Read more – ‘Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience’.
If you haven’t yet read SF Weekly‘s delicious article on San Francisco-based Zynga, publishers of FarmVille, (“FarmVillains: Steal someone else’s game. Change its name. Make millions. Repeat.”), put down those seeds and drop that hoe and head over there now. Criticisms and speculation about Zynga’s theft of ideas have been aired before, chiefly in tech-industry [...] Read more – ‘FarmVillains: “I don’t fucking want innovation”’.
In January of this year, on the day following the death of historian Howard Zinn, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz delivered a thoughtful little talk at SUNY Buffalo. In so doing, I think he managed neatly to extend Zinn’s 20th Century civitas a little further into our own time. “I’m worried that students will take their [...] Read more – ‘What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?’.
Raph Koster revisits his book on A Theory of Fun as he points to Loodo’s Calabouço Tétrico, a highly-polished, deeply disturbing Flash-based Tetris variant that replaces colored blocks with human beings in different states of distress. Speaking of it on his website, Ian Bogost points back to his text, Persuasive Games (wherein he rejects as [...] Read more – ‘Tetris and Torture’.
The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA‘s new downloadable expansion, the evocatively named biker scenario The Lost and the Damned. Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accompanied by violence. But most titles are set far away [...] Read more – ‘The Lost and the Damned at The NYTimes’.
Trying to discover a little bit more about ethics and the nature of malevolence in MMORPGs, I rolled a new Horde character: Badflower. I’ve made it to level 8, and this much is clear: In Warcraft, there are the Good, the “bad,” and the silly. WoW’s two factions are the Alliance and the Horde: Your [...] Read more – ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Silly’.
