ian bogost

Features

When The Going Gets Tough…Let The Game Play Itself

9:00AM Brian Crecente | Like many younger brothers I had a contentious relationship with my older brother. We butted heads, fought, lied, accused each other of unimaginable atrocities and genuinely despised one another — while secretly caring deeply what the other thought. More »
News

Water Cooler Games Closes

7:00AM Owen Good | Water Cooler Games, a standard-bearer for intelligent discussion of video games over the past six years, has been shuttered according to co-founder Ian Bogost in a final post made today. More »
Features

The Real Video Game Danger: They’re Too Safe?

8:00AM Brian Crecente | The summers of my childhood were marked with scars. Good scars, not bad ones. More »
Features

Making A Game Out Of Today’s War

7:00AM Mike Fahey | The video game industry was about to get its first major game based on a current military action, only to have publisher Konami pull the plug. What’s wrong with releasing a realistic war video game? More »
Culture

Kids Make Old Games Look Good On New TVs

9:30PM Luke Plunkett | Earlier this week, we saw the ugly side of modern emulation. So, in the interests of fairness, today let’s look at some people hoping to set things right. More »
Culture

Games As Journalism: A Quick Fix For A Dying Medium?

9:20AM AJ Glasser | An Online Journalism Blog article says that traditional news outlets need to start making video games that either replace or improve the delivery of news stories. More »
News

Ian Bogost On iPhone Games: Penis Pumps, Bras and Airport Security

10:00AM AJ Glasser | Ty Colfax at G4TV has an interview up with Persuasive Games founding partner Ian Bogost who documents the agony of getting his iPhone game, Jetset: A Game for Airports, through Apple’s approvals process. More »
News

On the ‘Birth and Death of the Political Game’

3:30AM Maggie Greene | Ian Bogost has a timely piece up on the issue of political-themed games, and their use — or lack thereof. Bogost draws a clear demarcation between politicking (which he feels most of these games do) versus politics — games have the potential to really speak towards politics, but wind up being more or less meaningless tools for politicking: More »

Artistic Sunday Timewaster: Honorarium

4:30AM Maggie Greene | Ian Bogost sent along this link to his latest little title, this one called Honorarium: “An autobiographical art game. Assemble lectures to present. If you do well enough, you can unlock invitations to travel and speak”. I’ve spent a bit of time with it — I guess I can sympathise with aspects of the game, since I’m the poster child for ‘inability to balance life and work — wait, work IS my life.’ Just as interesting, however, is his discussion of the way he created the game through Sims Carnival. EA invited Ian to create a game using the tools available through the site. And, as he points out: Much of the rhetoric surrounding these game creation and distribution sites relies on accessibility: they are supposed to make game development easy. But the truth is, simplified creation tools don’t necessarily make creativity easier or harder, they just impose different constraints. Honourarium [Sims Carnival via Ian Bogost] More »

The Wide World of Gaming: ‘The End of Gamers’

4:30AM Maggie Greene | Ian Bogost has an interesting editorial over at Edge Online entitled ‘The End of Gamers,’ a title which he admits doesn’t really capture the main argument: “["The End of Gamers"] is lurid but might not capture the main argument of the piece, which is more like “Things People Do with Games”. Much of his point is that other media has a wide variety of applications, and isn’t shoehorned into a few limited types of uses (’entertainment’ vs. ’serious’ and so on). Bogost isn’t arguing for ‘games as art’ or ‘games as useful’ or anything else, just pointing out that some perceptions about the industry start to break down when one considers the wide range of applications current games can have: More »