(This essay is at least partially in dialogue with Cameron Kunzelman's piece on Grand Theft Auto's Conservatism , which I largely agree with.) Grand Theft Auto is a videogame series about cities. As someone who has played innumerable games that take place in cities and who has extensively read literature in urban studies and design for my dissertation research in the Digital Media program at Ge...
I’ve seen some hate for events like E3 and I can fully sympathize. It’s a bunch of major corporations waging war for your money with ostentatious and often insincere presentations of consumerism. Yet, when you’ve grown up with a hobby you’re so invested in with both time and money, E3 proves to be a kind of exchange. The consumer asks, “what are you going to give me in return for what I’m going...
It has been a long while since I've posted to the blog. But this new Quest system has inspired me to come back and earn a few points. So what have I been doing all this time? First, I finished my Masters degree in Digital Media at Georgia Tech and started in the PhD program. I study games! Specifically I'm interested in the construction and experience of space and place in games. It's way rad....
I'm in the second year of my Master's program in which I'm fortunate enough to get to study games with some really smart people (both professors and students). I had been stressing because I had spent all this time in the program and still had no idea what to write my thesis about. Obviously it was going to deal with games, but nothing was really jumping out at me. So I sat with a pad of paper...
Low Score Episode 04 "Kevin is Smug" Hanging out at the Jersey shore, Bobby is joined by Kevin and Jimmy of the Virtual Fools to discuss their recent gaming habits and talk about their history with the boardwalks of New Jersey, including the trip they took that day to Seaside Heights to play classic arcade games. Download it. | Subscribe to it. Low Score Episode 05 "A Very Braidy Podcast" J's b...
So I started up a new game blog for both school and as a compliment to a project that has kind of fallen by the wayside. For my first post I talk about Galaga Legions and explain not only why I enjoy it but why it fits squarely in the Galaga tradition. Read it, won't you? 27 Years Later: How Galaga Legions Fits In
Coming off of a big news week, J and Bobby tone it down and discuss the new Giant Bomb.com, five weeks of Xbox Live Arcade releases, Bobby playing games on Live, game pricing, downloadable content, and some stuff they've been playing. Download it. | Subscribe to it. Awesome music by virt
Since the close of this year's Electronic Triple people have been speculating that we might not see an E3 next year. Having moved back from Santa Monica to its old home, the differences between the E3 of two years ago and today were quite different landscapes. There were criticisms that the invite-only attendee list (mostly press) took away the exciting atmosphere and left the place feeling emp...
Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer recently pointed readers to the Versus CluClu Land blog run by Iroquois Pliskin (Metal Gear?!). Both of these authors write intelligent pieces about videogames—something I used to do often but have slowed down on while doing game studies in grad school and juggling all sorts of other outside projects . Every so often I read a post that sparks me to respond and...