Gaming the System: Tanner Higgin

This is a follow-up to a previous post. Near the end of his talk Erik Loyer mentioned how music, although clearly a tool of emphasis in the post-plastic instrument peripheral games industry, still has a lot of untapped potential. One of the holy grails of game design, as most clearly demonstrated by the massive success of [...]

Jenova Chen, creative director of thatgamecompany graciously accepted my invite to give a talk at the University of California, Riverside for a research group I am a part of this week. Our research this year has focused on play with a particular interest in historicizing and expanding play beyond the boundaries of the common conceptualization of [...]

I saw this license plate on a truck today and was shocked by the connections to some issues I have been dealing with in my composition course this quarter. One of the selections we read from the popular culture criticism collection Signs of Life is by David Goewey. It’s an article titled “Careful, You May [...]

In the past when I have taught race in videogames for my freshman composition classes I have had a hard time explaining how to push beyond representational critiques of racial signification. Naturally students are more adept at analyzing the visual presentation and iconography of race in games than breaking down the more subtle and technical [...]

Twitter is the current hot social network and, for once, I think it is justified. As others have pointed out, what makes Twitter useful is its adherence to simplicity in design and features and the ability to be followed but not follow, or, its asymmetry. Academics have been especially intrigued by its functionality in the classroom [...]

Today N. Katherine Hayles gave a talk as part of a speaker series on Science Fiction at the University of California, Riverside.  It was entitled “Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End and the Macropolitics of Global Spatialization.” She set up a productive binary between the conservative transhumanist tendencies in theory and art and more progressive posthumanist tendencies. As she argued, transhumanism [...]

Crossposted on Gameology. Read part 2 here. Interactive media artist Erik Loyer, perhaps most well known to academics as Creative Director of Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology visited the University of California, Riverside earlier this week to give a talk titled “Stories as Instruments.” Loyer explained his design philosophy that games should break free of the restrictions of [...]

Here is a game that could be considered an extension of Alexander Galloway’s countergaming project. It allows complete visibility and modification of the code of the game.