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Category Archives: Rhetoric
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.
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 [...]
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. [...]
Obama Administration Asks Ballmer About Gaming the Budget