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’.
Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience “Sometimes disobedience is necessary and good when rules fail us, and it’s at the core of why we hack. Hacking is a means of expressing dissatisfaction, confounding the mechanism, and ultimately doing better. Here’s why it’s so important.” Read more – ‘Why We Hack: The Benefits of Disobedience’.
This semester, my graduate course Arcade Theory (CCTP628) is looking at the ways in which gaming technologies (both figurative and literal) are being adopted outside of Huizinga’s “magic circle.” I call this phenomenon “game creep.” Blog Kotaku has this recent note about how Vail is gaming the slopes with RFID tags: “Starting this November five [...] Read more – ‘Powder Power-Ups’.
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?’.
HASTAC (The Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) is definitely worth getting to know: I’ve been to two of their conferences, and they are terrific. Today, their blog calls attention to a new Call For Papers (Trento, Italy, Sept 2010) that is interesting chiefly for its desire to blend game studies with STS: CFP: [...] Read more – ‘CFP: Digital Game Play as Sociotechnical Practice | HASTAC’.
Now here is a class from which we could all learn something. Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes: Special Topics in Game Design and Analysis, Spring 2010. Georgia Institute of Technology. Hacks are works produced by making modifications to existing games by disassembling binaries, analyzing the meaning and purpose of the resulting source code, identifying desirable [...] Read more – ‘Syllabus: Atari Hacks, Remakes, and Demakes’.
