Gaming the System

In the past year, I have been struck by how often I see videogames as informing other media productions. Up until recently, games were often thought of as struggling for legitimacy by trying (and inevitably failing) to represent/approximate “reality” and/or appealing to more respected art forms. Academics, designers, fans, and media have all been guilty [...]

Recently, a friend of mine joined Twitter and the first direct message he sent me was a simple question: “Why are all the people posting on Twitter trends black?” It was an intentionally exaggerated but honest and innocent question and one I had been thinking about a lot lately. In the past few months, I had [...]

The Need for Videogame Literacies Kick-Ass is an important film for videogame scholars to see, especially with an audience. Many have made the claim that videogames have influenced film, but this influence has never been more apparent to me than in Kick-Ass. However, my concern is not with tracking the obvious visual/stylistic similarities (e.g. the first [...]

Linked in the quote below is a video and write-up from the Huffington Post about a recently Freedom of Information Act released video showing the murder of innocents, including journalists, in Iraq in 2007 by the U.S. military.  I am not sure I have seen a more disturbing example of the similarities between gameplay and [...]

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 [...]

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.