the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, game studies researchers presented their list of the top 10 most unexpected findings for video game designers over the past year. This marks the fourth year that researchers Ian Bogost, associate professor at Georgia Tech; Jane McGonigal, director of games research and development at the Institute for the Future; and Mia Consalvo, associate professor at Ohio University, have presented their list. But this year audience members â” both at the panel and via Twitter â” ranked the findings in order of their importance. â’Asking the audience to order the top 10 gave...
Posts Tagged ‘ media studies ’
The Book on Atari
Racing the Beam, The Atari Video Computer System, a book by Georgia Tech Associate Professor Ian Bogost, takes a look at the development of the first popular video game platform through the lens of six game cartridges to show how the developers of those games, for better or worse, laid the ground work for the industry Atari helped spawn. Those games are Combat, Adventure, Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Pitfall! and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. The book is the third by Bogost on video games and the first he’s co-written with MIT’s Nick Montfort. With this book, the pair...
Rubbernecking: Why We Love to Witness Disaster
Log onto YouTube and you can watch dozens of videos of planes crashing into the towers on 9/11 and victims leaping to their deaths. Browse Amazon for one of the 87 DVDs about Hurricane Katrina. Or tune into the Discovery Channelâ’s new show, â’Destroyed in Seconds.â’ â’Images of disaster haunt the American national consciousness and dominate the media,â’ says Emily Godbey, National Endowment for the Humanities Chair at Albright College in Reading, Pa., who is writing book on â’American Rubbernecking,â’ which examines how representations of disaster have become a part of popular American visual culture. â’No one wants to...
Bloggers to the Rescue
Considering all the layoffs, downsizes and cutbacks reported in the news these days, it’s not surprising to learn that the news itself is being cut back. According to Joe Samuel Starnes, visiting assistant professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, “You don’t have to look far to see struggling businesses, but newspapers have been going down for a while because of the loss of advertising revenue and readership.” In response to the newspaper industry’s decline, he said, “It’s concerning because our democracy needs good journalism, and newspapers have supplied and supported a majority of our country’s high-quality reporting in...
Women Get to the Point :: Too Bad it is When Texting
In an article in the latest edition of the quarterly journal Written Communication, IU researchers Susan Herring and Asta Zelenkauskaite show that while men historically talk more in public settings, when the exchanges occur via text messaging in a public venue — in this case, Italy’s real-time interactive music television channel Allmusic — it is the women who push their messages closest to the character-count limit, who use more abbreviations and insertions, and who implement more emoticons (like smiling and frowning faces). “The messages are very flirtatious and have nothing to do with the television show,” said Herring, a professor...