Category Archives: Rhetoric

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 [...]
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For Your Consideration

For your con­sid­er­a­tion, I com­mend to you — with­out com­ment– the fol­low­ing arti­cle, from the closely-followed Opin­ions page of the Wichita Eagle. “Are Video Games Caus­ing Achieve­ment Gap?” by John Richard Schrock, “trainer of biol­ogy teachers.” Advanced read­ers will want to be sure and iden­tify by name each log­i­cal fal­lacy that appears in the op-ed.
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Joyride: NASA MMO and the Rhetoric of the Military Industrial Complex

How much “fun” will NASA’s much-touted Unreal 3-based MMO be when it is released next year? If the cap­tions to still images released on devel­oper Project Whitecard’s web­site are any indi­ca­tion, not much. Here’s how they describe the Regolith Grinder (aka “The Taurus”): “Con­tructed from an advanced smelt­ing process and lunar fac­tory, it is a general-purpose [...]
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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 [...]
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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. [...]
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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. [...]
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