Co-authored Abstract for DiGRA 2015: William Robinson, Dylan Lederle-Ensign and Michael Mateas Procedural Deformation and the Close Playing/Reading of Code: An Analysis of Jason Rohrer’s Code in Passage Despite Game Studies’ interest in digital games, the field has paid comparatively little attention to the algorithms underlying the medium. The following paper argues for the value Read More
I am elbows deep in readings for my comprehensive exam with Mia Consalvo. The topic is Player and Audience Studies. So far, I have gone through about a third the works on the docket. I wanted to give mini-reviews of each for my own purposes, as an exercise in brevity, but also as a mini-annotated Read More
When I was a child, I heard that the athletes attending the Mexico City Olympics opted to move months earlier to adapt the high altitude’s lack of available oxygen. No one told me about the Olympics in Salt Lake. At DiGRA 2014, in the illustrious Cliff Lodge at Snowbird, approximately 100 game scholars gave talks Read More
I am travelling on a train across the Mid-West, recognizing that despite many similarities, this is not equivalent to flying. The routes, technological history, and cost of trains has led to a strange demographic on board. On this journey, a quarter of Amtrak’s clientele is Amish. Through first-hand experience I can say that at Read More
Weeknote I have been thinking about hosting lately. It all started when I tried to compare card game Dominion (Vaccarino 2008) to its online counterpart Dominion Online. The analog version made a splash in 2009 winning the Spiel Des Jahres. The SDJ is a German award which catalyzed the Eurogame movement, promoting design innovations that Read More
In his essay, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?,” Bruno Latour suggests that unlike the military industrial complex, “It does not seem to me that we have been as quick, in academia, to prepare ourselves for new threats, new dangers, new tasks, new targets” (225). These sentiments were recently echoed by his former student, Read More
I deformed a falafel recipe from Chefs Yotam Ottolenghi amd Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem using a variation of an Oulipo technique, N + 7. Instead of replacing each noun for the seventh one following it in the dictionary, I replaced each ingredient with the seventh one following it in a list of all the ingredients in Read More
I set out to map Jerusalem’s cultural sectors through the relationships between its culinary ingredients. The thought, absurd as it might seem, was planted in my brain when I came across a famous adaptation of the 1581 Bünting Clover Leaf wood cut. Near Jerusalem’s Municipal complex, in Safra Square, Arman Darian’s tiles position Jerusalem at Read More
MacLuhan’s perennial aphorism “the medium is the message” has me thinking about acrylic polymers. These are the literal media that hold in suspension the pigments of certain painters. This is true of my own pigments, for I am a table-top miniature painter, who participates in a multifaceted hobby of strategy gaming and fiction-making called Warhammer Read More
@DangerWillRobin. Before arriving at DiGRA one week ago, I tweeted about once per month on average. I had 65 followers and followed a similar number. Now: 102 followers with 75 more tweets. While I can admit that I went a little twitter crazy, I did not crack the top 10 for freq. in conf. tweeters. Read More