At some point in his reflections on the coming information society (better, société de contrôle), Deleuze pointed to the American highway system as a metaphor for the affordances, and phantasmatic freedoms, of technology. At first, he says, the highway system seems to grant you unlimited freedom. But upon further reflection, you realize that the system [...] Read more – ‘Kinect-ing to Deleuze’.
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?’.
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’.
Unable to sleep, Gail Nichols spent a lot of time in front of PopCap’s Bejeweled, a game notable for its non-competitive, flow–inducing modes. According to the Washington Post, Nichols liked the game so much that she got in touch with the manufacturer, PopCap Games. The inventors of the game were surprised to hear about its [...] Read more – ‘PopCap funds study on games, mental health’.
Augmented reality applications and games have been a gleam in the eyes of developers (and the promise of trade show charlatans) for decades, but with increasingly ubiquitous video cam inputs and tons of spare processing power, they are finally becoming a reality. Via Gizmodo: Players interact with their virtual pet using a bundled card and [...] Read more – ‘Eyepet: Augmented Reality’.
