Tag: Game Development
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Dear Twitter: Name my F-ing Book
Dear Twitter… Name my book. Seriously. The book has lived in my head for far too long as Developers in the Mist that I can’t really imagine it as anything different. I posed the question to the Extending Play community today and received some very helpful suggestions. The book is an ethnography of the “AAA”…
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Kick Starting Fans and the Play of Patronage
[Cross Posted over at Culture Digitally] It has been a strange couple of days in #GAMEDEV land. For those that haven’t followed Double Fine’s Adventure on KickStarter, now would be a good time to start. The short story is that a small studio run by a game development luminary employing other game development legends managed…
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Over on #CULTD: On Power Gamers and Instrumental Play
As usual, I’m chasing the Ice Cream Truck. I’ve been thinking a lot about users / producers (and for me this continues to be game developers) and procedural rhetoric(s). Ian’s comments in particular spurred my thoughts on this. I’m going to omit much of the broader conversation around a certain recent essay, but I want…
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The Brewing Storm Between Games and Education
[This post is cross-posted from over at the Culture Digitally site.] This one has been brewing for a while. Perhaps, as Stephen Totilo notes, ever since Raph Koster voiced his concerns back in 2006. I believe that there is a storm coming between “game people” and educators, precisely at a moment when money is flooding into these realms. So,…
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Why I ♥ Vertical Slices
I’ve found myself relaying to students recently, a story of my experience at GDC this last year. I wound up at the Scandinavian Indie Games Party watching and playing the 2008 Vertical Slice of the Xbox 360 Game Limbo. It was actually one of my primary reasons for going to this gathering. I was interested…
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Ship it! Reflecting on Osy
[Note: For those of you getting this link because of your “(baby)alexis” notifications, I couldn’t help not including you. :)] Osy (“Osy Osmosis”), a game cooperatively developed by myself and members of a research team at the University of Georgia hit the App Store late last night. Osy’s development has spanned just about two years…
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Reflecting on #GGJ11
Clearly, I am not a very good blogger. The Global Game Jam (GGJ) ended nearly two weeks ago and I’ve been silent on the matter. The buzz is dead, and I’ve only now had enough time to really digest my experience. The GGJ has become a significantly important educational and creative event for the game…
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Taking Game Development Seriously
I’ll start this post as someone who has lived and worked in the game industry for a while now and then switch into a more “objective” register as I attempt to analyse this phenomenon from the perspective of an anthropologist and historian of game development coming from the perspective of the field of science and…
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GLS: The One That Got Away… This Year
For the most part anymore, when I submit to conferences I assume that, more than likely, the paper will be accepted. The primary exception of course is GDC (the Game Developers Conference), which I submit one or two ideas to every year. I’ve managed acceptance twice, which I tally as success, but year over year…
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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…