Category: (dis)continutity
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Whither Mario Factory?: The Downside to Academic Publishing
I’ve been sitting on this material for a while. Many of my informants would recognize it as coming from back in 2006 when I was passing the PDFs around Vicarious Visions. Starting in 2008, the essay has been reviewed well and reviewed poorly and still not accepted. One interesting thing has been that despite good…
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Of Geeks, Games, and Girls
I read this a while back. The essay, which looks at how geek/nerd culture may discourage women from studying computer science troubled me. It troubled me because much of geek/nerd culture is precisely what is produced by engineers that go into game development. So are these researchers telling me that because games are rooted in…
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The Price of “Closed” Hardware
I’ve been screaming about it for a while now, 2007 to be precise. But the proof is in the numbers. More game developers are working on the iPhone and soon the iPad. The DSi’s lack of support for an open SDK is particularly nonsensical, given its reliance on less expensive games for download. But, the…
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The Cult(ure) of Secrecy…
I mentioned it in my dissertation. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Smarter folks than I say it all the time. That great idea you have? Your obsession with secrecy? Yeah… It’s not that cool really. Your idea might become cool. But that will be pretty close to the time you release it. It…
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On Game Mechanic Patents…
Anyone familiar with me, or my work, knows that I spend far too much time looking at the patents that come out of videogame companies. Why? Because they’re interesting and they index what these companies really value as innovative. It is also often the only real information available about how their devices function, at least…
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One that I Missed…
Early last year, after I learned my wife was pregnant, I sat down and did a great deal of planning for how to organize the next year of work – conferences, essays, course development, etc – in order to figure out how to best balance work and family. Of course I’m sure that my best-laid-plans…
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Production Protection to Copy(right) Protection
I have an essay up over on the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing titled, “Production Protection to Copy(right) Protection: From the 10NES to DVDs” talking about how many copy protection schemes also have roots in controlling the ability create content. Simply put, copy protection retains an inherent interest in also controlling the means…
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Daily Digest for November 17th
Shared Tradewest co-founder passes away at 75. Shared 3 links. PS3s Replace Costly PCs to Crack Pedo Passwords PS3s Replace Costly PCs to Crack Pedo Passwords Apple seeks game guru for app development Published Game Studies and Game Development Texts. Irony: ICE must use old PS3 instead of new for password cracking. No Linux on…
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PS3s, ICE, and the Cost of Irony?
Saw this post about ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement) use of PS3s for the cracking of child pornographer’s passwords. I’m not even going to get into the debate surrounding that, because it isn’t really what I’m interested in here. What I am interested in is that ICE is using PS3s for this job. However, they’ll…