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Category Archives: Politics
What Would Tocqueville Make of the American (Digital) Farmer?
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 obedient [...]
Also posted in CCTP-628, Courses, Interactivity, Literacy, Technology, ethics Tagged civics, Farmville, Liszkiewicz, SUNY, Zinn Leave a comment
Mona Lisa / Duck Hunt Mashup
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 Bruno [...]
Also posted in Aesthetics, Humanities, Interactivity, Video Tagged art, Italy, museum Leave a comment
Obama Administration Asks Ballmer About Gaming the Budget
Via Kotaku (via USAToday), word that Erskine Bowles has contacted Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer to chat about a game built around balancing the U.S. budget. It’s an interesting idea that’s actually been done (and done well) already. In 2008, MarketPlace, from American Public Media, launched Budget Hero: Budget Hero tries to bring a level of clarity [...]
Also posted in Rhetoric Tagged Ballmer, Bowles, budget, Budget Hero, crowdsourcing, DC, Obama, serious games 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 the [...]
Tetris and Torture
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 [...]
On Newsgames’ Newsworthiness
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. [...]
Be All You Can Be (For A Quarter, To Start)
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. [...]
GMU “Overwhelmed” by Interest in Game Design BFA