Archive for the 'Academics' Category

Escapist: Anti-advergames

Posted by Jared on February 19th, 2008

An article of mine that I wrote for The Escapist few months back finally dropped today.

It basically takes on Ian Bogost’s argument that “anti-advergames,” defined as games that protest a product or service, can change the way consumers think. This was my first opinion piece of any considerable length, and it was a little unnerving to challenge one of the industry’s most respected academics, but the editors seemed to like it so hopefully I’ll get to do this more in the future.

A note for the record: I was dismayed to see that Chris Dahlen, a fine video game journalist, used a similar “look we love you Ian, but…” cushion when reviewing “Fatworld” in January, somewhat stealing the thunder of my own lede, which was penned last year but did not come out ’till today. Whatever, I guess it can’t be said enough.

Game Studies Lighting Round

Posted by Jared on April 8th, 2007

This is about a month old, but I found slides from GDC’s Top Ten Game Studies 2007, at Avant Game blog.

These are brief snapshots of studies done this year. Most interesting in my opinion is this sentence:

“Players are a little likely to want to enact their personalities, but very likely to want to enact their race or gender.”

The PDF file can be viewed directly here.

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