Category Archives: Politics

The Course of Empire

By Garrison | Published: February 1, 2010
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 [...]
Also posted in Courses, ethics | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Tetris and Torture

By Garrison | Published: February 19, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Aesthetics, Rhetoric, ethics | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

On Newsgames’ Newsworthiness

By Garrison | Published: January 8, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in News, Rhetoric | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Be All You Can Be (For A Quarter, To Start)

By Garrison | Published: January 5, 2009
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 [...]
Also posted in Rhetoric | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment