Watch this video on YouTube A 5 minute video about testing the limits of the critically acclaimed medieval strategy game. Can you replace nobles with republics, dismantle the papacy, and create an ecofeminist society in the AD 1200? Yes, yes, and yes.
Category Archives: writings
Two Hundred Fifty Things a Game Designer Should Know
In 2018, architecture critic Michael Sorkin wrote “Two Hundred Fifty Things an Architect Should Know”. The items on the listicle are poetic, thought provoking, introspective, practical, and sometimes even canonical. They all connect architecture with broader social issues. In July 2020, four months after Sorkin’s death due to COVID-19, I challenged my Twitter friends and aquaintances …
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Gaming under socialism
In a recent episode of the politics/comedy podcast Chapo Trap House, a listener asked “What can socialism do for gamers’ rights?”. The question was obviously a joke, but the hosts produced a humorous and somewhat thoughtful answer. Thankfully, there is no such a thing as “gamers’ rights” in the sense of something distinct from consumer …
Big Data Manifesto
I took Tristan Tzara’s DADA manifesto from 1921 and replaced every instance of DADA with BIG DATA. Big Data Manifesto
Invisible Walls, Puffy Clouds, and the Unheavenly World Behind Them
This is the transcript of a minitalk I gave at Lost Levels 2014, an “unconference” happening during the Game Developers Conference (maybe a bit too square and academic for that casual environment). It’s a topic I’ve addressed in every single talk in the last 10 years or so, but I thought it could benefit from …
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Videogames and the Spirit of Capitalism
This is a talk I gave at Indiecade East 2014 (remotely due to snow-related flight cancellation). It’s based on an text I wrote for the catalog of Time & Motion: Redefining Working Life, an exhibition at FACT gallery in Liverpool. It’s also meant to be a companion piece for the game To Build a Better …
Videogames of the oppressed vs oppressive games
This is my second post on Empyre, a longstanding discussion list for artists, programmers, and curators of new media art. The theme of the month is “Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight”. You can check the March archive here. Here I talk about Molleindustria in relation to the context in which it started (almost 10 years ago) …
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Art cred and videogame advocacy
For the first week of March I’ve been invited to be a guest of Empyre, a longstanding mailing list for artists, programmers, and curators of new media art. The theme of the month is “Videogames and Art: Incite/Insight”. I’m re-posting some of my discussion starters here, for the rest of the world. You can read …
Gatekeeper and the rise of the Total Apple Consumer
Somewhere in UK, a dialog box pops up on the screen of a Mac computer. The user contacts me asking for an explanation I can’t quite provide. The same file (a downloadable version of Phone Story) works perfectly on my machine, also a Mac. It turns out the “file damaged” message is produced by Gatekeeper, …
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The Trouble With Call of Duty’s Scary New War
A couple of months ago, Stephen Totilo from Kotaku read some angry tweets of mine regarding the teaser campaign for Call of Duty: Black Ops 2. Stephen asked me if I was interested in expanding my 140 character long rants into a 400-600 hundred word article. I gave him 1600 words. I republish the entire …
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