Reading Owen Good’s (excellent!) short article on the difficulties presented in bringing pro wrestling to the game console (The Spectacle Of Pro Wrestling, Played With A Straight Face), I came across this little gem: “Calling pro wrestling ‘fake’ is neither accurate nor informed. The term is ‘kayfabe.’ Kayfabe isn’t a euphemism for false. Kayfabe is [...] Read more – ‘The Spectacle Of Pro Wrestling, Played With A Straight Face’.
Via GamePolitics, news that the new-ish Game Design BFA offered at GMU has met with“overwhelming” student response. A story in the Fairfax Times reports that the school has already enrolled around 200 students into the program, besting an internal goal of having 110 students in the program by 2012. As Scott M. Martin, Assistant Dean [...] Read more – ‘GMU “Overwhelmed” by Interest in Game Design BFA’.
Close on the heels of the Italian government’s recent public statements on the civic and aesthetic merits of video games (and the taxable appeal of game studio revenues, no doubt), Associazione Italiana Opere Multimediali Interattive (AIOMI) has released the first of what will be several video shorts promoting interactive media in Italy. And like a [...] Read more – ‘Mona Lisa / Duck Hunt Mashup’.
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 [...] Read more – ‘Kirschenbaum’s Simulations Course at UMD’.
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 of leveraging [...] Read more – ‘Thesis Tweetstream’.
Professor Bogost, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, continues to be one of my favorite contemporary thinkers on matters digital. Following close on the end of MLA 09, he has weighed in on recent ruminations about the direction of the humanities with a brief, simmering note. He writes: Humanists work hard, but at all the [...] Read more – ‘On The Turtlenecked Hairshirt’.
