Category Archives: Politics

Matthew Wasteland on the big, deep currents of history in game dev

I missed this at the end of last month (I am hunkered down in hardcore thesis/teaching/marking/paper-writing mode) but Matthew Wasteland distilled something really interesting and important about where “game development” is at right now. The interesting thing is the way … Continue reading

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David Graeber on Ethnography

Taken from the Preface to his 2009 book ‘Direct Action, An Ethnography’ all about the 2000/2001 protests and riots against the WTO, etc., pages vii-viii: Call this book, then, a tribute to the continued relevance of ethnographic writing. By “ethnographic writing,” … Continue reading

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The differential gear, explained

Watch the following video, there’s a lot to unpack beyond the sheer impressiveness of explaining complex engineering: The most amazing thing to me is its tacit expectation about the audience’s ability to comprehend. This is seriously complicated engineering and it shows. … Continue reading

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Go play ‘The River’ a game by Courtney Stanton

here.

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Garden as Subtweet

In this episode of Monty Don’s BBC series on Italian Gardens he travels around looking at grand, opulent gardens built by wealthy, powerful cardinals to impress (naturally) the other wealthy cardinals vying for the papacy around the turn of the … Continue reading

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James Baldwin’s writerly interests

“About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that … Continue reading

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Far Cry 3 and designer inducements

Thinking some more about the ideas in Andrew Vanden Bosche’s great post that I responded to the other day, I realised that I hadn’t really thought about it from the perspective of the game designer, i.e. from the position that … Continue reading

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Passive agression, Spec Ops: The Line, and the individual onus

Andrew Vanden Bossche has a great little post up on his tumblr about the way Shinji Ikari in Evangelion reacts to being told what to do, wanting to resist doing it, while also being unable to say ‘no’ to his … Continue reading

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Livin the gun life

Check out the weird dissonance of this: At the same time, though, I was a little jealous of those getting permits. Taking my guns from the safe was a rare treat; the sensual pleasure of handling guns is a big … Continue reading

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Transcription: highlights from Timothy Morton’s Q&A session after ‘On Entering the Anthropocene’

On Friday, August 24th 2012 Tim Morton gave a rapid fire talked entitled ‘On Entering the Anthropocene’ as part of the launch of the new UNSW based journal of Environmental Humanities. I went along to the talk which was typical … Continue reading

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