This will be part of my upcoming Computers and Writing presentation. I've got to prepare it in the next week, so pretty much everything I write for the next few days will be part of that presentation damnit! So, spoiler alert, I guess. Ian Bogost has a piece on Gamasutura taking on one of his favored targets,... Continue Reading →
humanities, the game #hgi
Today was the first day of the Humanities Gaming Institute. It seems like a well-structured program and they've brought together an interesting group of people. So I am curious to see how it moves forward.Here are a few thoughts that struck me on day one. I have a sense of caution for the academic impulse... Continue Reading →
post-procedural rhetoric and serious games
I was reading Ian Bogost's "Rhetoric of Video Games" and was interested in his use of the term "procedural rhetoric." The term is also central to his book, Persuasive Games. The term caught my eye in part because it is the same term that Richard Fulkerson employs in his 2005 CCC essay "Composition at the Turn... Continue Reading →
augmented reality, serious games, and pedagogic secrets
I was reminded earlier of Don DeLillo's White Noise and the scene early in the novel where Gladney visits the "most photographed barn in America" and his friend observes that, of course, no one can actually see the barn. It's an observation that summons Baudrillard's precession of the simulacra. 25+ years later, seeing the same barn... Continue Reading →
goodness me, could this be industrial disease?
A recent story on BBC and elsewhere reports the spread of a deadly disease among characters in the online role-playing enviornment World of Warcraft. I suppose this counts as a computer virus. Apparently the virus is spread from the killing of a particular creature, Hakkar the god of blood. As BBC explains The infection was... Continue Reading →
