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Category Archives: Videogames

Graham’s comments on Ian

31-Aug-10

Thought I should link to Graham’s helpful and positive comments on Bogost’s research. Many many times in conferences and seminars, (particularly the critical theory ones), I’ve had to bring in one or two academics to task on certain off-hand points, regarding videogames. Bogost’s work always provides ample defence on such occasions. Outside of game studies, [...]

Zizek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse / video game metaphor

27-Aug-10

Zizek’s appeared, this time he’s been interviewed for New Scientist. Like all “cultural esoteric heroes from the Humanities” interviews that seem popular at the moment, this ones got several mini-generalisations that I’m sure will spur a few questions. Alongside the statement that philosophers should join scientists in investigating metaphysical questions about reality (is he trying [...]

Updates: Bizarre occurrences and a Bioshock treat

25-Aug-10

Two updates really; Yesterday, whilst writing this paper on Metaphysics, Violence and Security for the Annual Critical Theory conference in Exeter, something bizarre occurred. I happened to stumble upon an old Hotmail contact I made when I moved back down to Devon about two years ago. His name’s Sam Goodman, a PhD student at Exeter University [...]

Clicking Cows (and silencing rants)

22-Jul-10

Ian’s developed a fantastic strategy to argue and persuade Facebook gamers on the usefulness of playing social games like Farmville. In essence, its a Facebook game about Facebook games, the Facebook game equivalent of A Cock and Bull Story perhaps? Its a game-parody called Cow Clicker – very simple; “You get a cow. You can [...]

Grand Theft Auto and the Unmarked space

10-Jul-10

Levi has a stunningly good post on the meta levels of boundaries and distinctions in relation to OOO. The most important points he makes (in relation to Bogost’s linked post) are the shortcomings of analysing digital media within academia. He argues that cultural commentators tend to decode images, games, texts from the result of immanent [...]

The pleasure of being a scavenger in Bioshock 2

07-Jul-10

I’ve been playing the videogame Bioshock 2 for a couple of weeks now. Released a number of months ago, I’ve come quite late to the party, (as with most games at the moment), but I thought I’d share some thoughts I have about it for those not familiar. Bioshock is one of a very very [...]

OOO Symposium audio online

13-May-10

Here it is, will listen when I get back from work.

Gratton’s Interview with Bogost

26-Apr-10

Following on from Bennett and Harman, Gratton interviews Ian Bogost, another advocate of the OOO posse. Again like Bennett’s work, Gratton offers a concise summary of Bogost’s well known research into video games. But highlights Unit Operations as a key pre-OOO text that deals with units rather than systems. I can’t give enough praise for [...]

Laser plays Super Mario

15-Apr-10

Seriously. Laser engraver plays Super Mario theme from Jedediah Smith on Vimeo.

External Rewards

27-Feb-10

A lot of bloggish buzz has surrounded Jesse Schell’s DICE 2010 lecture and his commitment to external rewards ‘dystopia’ future, highlighted in the talk below. Schell’s vision is pretty Utopian and stark. In the same way that video designers design algorithms to control how players ‘play’ a particular videogame, Schell is convinced that similar forms [...]