Archive for the 'Videogames' Category

Teaching Technology: Video Games

12May08

Here’s the third entry in my series of posts highlighting my students’ work from my Media Technology course. One key medium that we studied was videogames, and it has been a challenge to think about how to create a project that allows students to make media criticism using videogame technology – if I had the [...]


Filed under: Middlebury, New Media, Teaching, Technology, Videogames   |  1 Comment
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Game interfaces for academic writing?

24Jun07

Over the past couple of days, I read Ian Bogost’s book Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. It’s very, very good, and I’m sure will be very influential within game studies and media studies more broadly. It’s certainly going to be helpful as I revise my article on The Wire. And Ian’s a great [...]


Filed under: Academia, Books, Media Studies, New Media, Videogames   |  5 Comments

Gaming Across the Curriculum

08Jun07

Today was Middlebury’s Library & Information Services in-service day, where all the staff gets together to do a workshop, and celebrate the end of the academic year. Inspired by the gaming lab developed for my course Media Technology & Cultural Change, the theme of today’s session was videogames. The morning started out with a brief [...]


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The Wire and the Serial Procedural: An Essay in Progress

22May07

Update: The book containing this essay, Third Person: Authoring and Exploring Vast Narratives, is out and looks amazing! Buy it now…
I have been invited to contribute an essay about the fabulous HBO show The Wire for the forthcoming anthology Third Person, a book about “vast narratives” in the series edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat [...]


Filed under: Narrative, TV Shows, Videogames   |  28 Comments
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Decent Reporting on Media Effects (for a change)

25Apr07

In my previous post about not turning-off TV, one common argument that I didn’t mention is the media effects paradigm: watching TV causes violence, anti-social behavior, sexual permissiveness, etc. It’s a dead-end argument for many reasons, especially in inspiring a generalized ban or dismissal of the medium – even if some programming does cause some [...]


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Some Sunday morning reading

28Jan07

Grab your cup of coffee and mull on the following:
Interesting account of the controversy surrounding the videogame Super Columbine Massacre, which offers social commentary through satire in game form. For many, it hits too hard & close to tragedy, even though it intends to critique the culture of violence that it has been accused of [...]


Filed under: Media Studies, TV Shows, Videogames   |  2 Comments
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Interactive television – is it already here?

19Nov06

A nice article in today’s New York Times discusses the growth in interactive technologies for watching television, such as DVRs, enhanced programming, and the like. The article does a good job noting that such innovations encourage viewer activity, while acknowledging that the assumed mode of “couch potato” viewing was never as pervasive or passive as [...]


Filed under: Technology, Videogames   |  1 Comment