The Rawls discussion sparked a provoking line of inquiry on game designers turning their systems expertise to real world issues, and especially voting.

As the conversation grows more sprawling, I have a more difficult time keeping up with the different branches and simultaneous threads.

For the Game Cultures seminar at ITU, I presented a companion lecture for our session on Co-Creative Labour and Culture.  For that class, we read Hector Postigo’s “From Pong to Planet Quake,” Henry Jenkins’ “Interactive Audiences?”, a chapter of Jon Dovey & Helen Kennedy’s Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media titled “Interventions and Recuperations?” [...]

Rich Dansky (who worked on the development of Changeling: The Dreaming) said that after the game’s release the darkfae-l listserv had “a rampaging debate on the list over how the folks at White Wolf had gotten so much of their existence right”, adding, “Finally, one of the list members came to the obvious conclusion that we’d gotten it [...]

I bought Minecraft months ago, but I haven’t really played it for more than a few hours.  I have a post to make about how Terraria is superior in every way that is relevant to me & how its recent cancellation is a travesty that proves we live in a fallen & degenerate world.  That is [...]

With a Brief Digression On the Use of “Train” in MMO Vernacular I frequently dabble in the study of mutant poetics.  What is the nature and extent of this idiosyncratic study, you might ask?  I hazard that it’s somewhat related to the field of neologism, the propagation of new words and the recognition thereof.  Mutant [...]

Recommended listening: Cave – W U J As I’ve coquettishly hinted at previously, I’m taking classes on both game journalism and digital game theory this semester & thus have placed my feet to the fire on this whole writing about video games thing.  In digital game theory, we are required to “blog” (I don’t blog [...]

Excuse a bit of wordpride, but I just had an article I wrote on a really cool PlayStation Move controller go up on Kill Screen.  Check it out here. I had a really good time at Nordic Game Jam, and I think I’m about to do a short piece about it for a Nordic game [...]

UPDATE: The link to the full-text article was originally incorrect.  You can download the paper here. In the twilight of last year, I re-read Caillois and Huizinga. I concluded that people had been too hard on Huizinga and largely ignored what’s interesting about Caillois, but I also can’t shake the feeling that neither writer has [...]

An interesting snippet on Marx and play that I stumbled across in Wikipedia under the “Criticisms” section of Commodity Fetishism. “Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism is therefore claimed to be an exaggeration, because in real life people simply do not fetishize objects to the extent that Marx thinks they do. They apply all sorts of [...]