Blips, bloops and beeps emit from the room that houses the exhibit, where a dozen video-arcade games from the late 1970s and ’80s are lovingly arranged in chronological order, each lit with a single spotlight. Three free tokens, good for one game play each, are included with museum admission. Additional tokens may be purchased for…
those in the humanities tended to distrust the technology, and those in the sciences often considered humanities-applications to be wasteful of a precious resource. Specific kinds of projects, however, were more readily assisted by 1960s technology, even if character-sets were inadequate because computer-printers had either an all-uppercase or upper-and-lowercase character-set that was designed to represent…
The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections. While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren’t able to attend the conference, if you’re new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction. Over the past few years,…
Tell your kids, there are more and more ways to make a career out of video games! They could become game designers; they could also play games all the time (or observe other people doing so) for academic research. — Anne Collier —Web News Brief 7 (Net Family News) Tell your kids — maybe it’s not…
Culture CacheJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections. “Culture” was in the title of the conference, but it was only obliquely discussed, as in Peter Bell’s “Hidden play,” an analysis of handheld gaming culture (as compared to cultural responses to the Sony Walkman); and Greg Lastowka’s “Virtual crimes,” which ponders the legal…
Is There a Ludologist in the House?Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections. The absence of European videogame theorists turned the Princeton Video Game Criticism Conference, at first simply by default, into a polite but noticeable anti-ludologist festival. I don’t want to give the impression that we were overrun by knee-jerk narratologists,…
FilmCroft: I’m Ready for My Close-upJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections. Jordan Hall’s presentation was the only one that relied heavily on cinema theory, though she showed an admirable awareness of the problems such an approach causes. To take just one example, she suggests that the default method of playing the…
Form, Culture, and Video Game CriticismJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I see that Nick Montfort has already posted a quick overview at GrandTextAuto, so I won’t try to cover everything and every talk equally — instead, I’ll focus on those talks about which I have the most to say (however naive some of my reaction may be).…
Princeton Videogame Conference: PrologueJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Presenters have started to gather for Princeton’s videogame conference. About eight of us met for some socialization last night. On the way home, I misread my map, managed to get myself taken to the wrong Red Roof Inn. This is all rather ironic, since part of my talk covers…
‘The Passion’ is the MediumJerz’s Literacy Weblog) I hadn’t intended to write this today, but a student stopped me after class today to talk about the movie, and I just got an e-mail from a colleague asking my opinion, so I might as well write this down. Yes, I had to look away during the…
Examining the ‘10%’ MemeJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Many of my students are thinking and talking about the gay marriage issue. Johanna Dreyfuss mentioned the “10%” statistic, citing the Kinsey report, via http://www.socal-glide.org/statistics.html. I’ve encountered this statistic in student papers before, so I know that Kinsey didn’t actually claim that 10% of the population was gay. According…
What stinks about the whole affair is not the glee with which Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies (including, apparently, this most recent one) are supplied to him by print journalists who don’t have enough evidence to put them into their…
The Nietzschean diet, which commands its adherents to eat superhuman amounts of whatever they most fear, is developing a strong following in America. … “One must strive to eat dangerously as one comes into the Will to Power Oneself Thin,” Nietzsche wrote. “What do you fear? By this are you truly Fattened. You must embrace…
Today’s computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It’s just like “Space,…
The notion that women want to be with their kids is crucial to the logic of de Marneffe’s argument. With it, she inverts the whole Friedanian case against domesticity. In de Marneffe’s view, it is a mistake to equate staying at home with forgoing an adult identity, because it is precisely in caring for children…
For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” is, improbably, an important news source. A poll released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people aged 18 to 29 cited “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” as a…
It’s a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. —Jakob Nielsen —Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox) Note… he’s…
Scientists have cast doubt on the well-established theory that a single, massive asteroid strike killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. New data suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, supposedly created by the collision, predates the extinction of the dinosaurs by about 300,000 years. —Dinosaur impact theory challenged (BBC) Other cosmic news: Mars “soaking wet…
So why this terror of the new medium? I don’t think it has much to do with the concern to protect the weak and feeble-minded potential murderers out there. This is all about money. Television is one of the media which has the most to lose, as statistics show that games take time away not…
The electric shock hadn’t hurt Jeremy very much, but he had bumped his head on a metal leg of the auditorium seats which he fell into. I had told him to ham it up when I applied the electrode of my violet-ray machine to his outstretched hand, but this was much more than I expected.…