Playing the Pandemic

It’s New Year’s Eve, 2020. To say that it’s been a pretty horrible year would certainly be an understatement, nor has my experience been uniquely horrible. In fact, I count myself very lucky to have made it through the year…

Virtual Authenticity

Much of the conversation revolved around the common issues around anonymity and the Internet, namely, that anonymity (or at least the perception of anonymity) shields people from accountability for their actions, removing the consequences for antisocial behavior.  Interactions in virtual…

The Curse of Academic Blogging

No blog is complete without the occasional blog about why you’re not blogging, so I couldn’t consider myself a savvy blogger if I didn’t do it as well from time to time.  Although things have been pretty sparse around here…

Old Weird Games: Captain Blood

Many early videogames were inspired by technological innovations.  Advances in natural language processing led Will Crowther to create Colossal Cave Adventure1 and John Carmack’s smooth-scrolling PC engine would inspire the future developers of Id Software to create the side-scrolling Commander…

Terraforming in the South China Sea

One of the things that I find most fascinating and engaging about videogames is their capacity to serve as interactive thought experiments.  Games can be ways of making explicit (or more often implicit) arguments, ways of trying to understand the…