Both gaming and music blogs have been abuzz the last few days over Harmonix’s announcement that they’re developing a new Rock Band Network in which any band — unsigned, indie, or major label — can submit tracks for download and purchase via Rock Band. That is, they’re starting a new digital distribution method for music, [...]

Whew, what a tiring month. Since mid-May, I’ve been out and about at several interesting conferences — all games-related and all communities that I’d like to continue to be a part of in the coming years. First, I was on a panel about promoting the “designer mindset” at the Games For Change (G4C) festival at [...]

As I posted a few months ago, I’ve been interested in retro gaming and older games as of late. And, as I was financially unable to attend GDC — that bastion of what’s latest, greatest, and interesting in new games right now — I figured I might blog a bit about some of these older [...]

I’m currently in the process of writing a chapter for the upcoming World of Warcraft and Philosophy (edited by Luke Cuddy and John Nordlinger for Open Court), so my thoughts have turned back to the chapter in The Legend of Zelda and Philosophy that Jim Gee and I wrote. Out of curiosity, I popped onto [...]

I don’t know why this is, but this month has turned into a regular Space Invaders, uh, invasion. As I noted in an earlier blog post, I’ve been playing Space Invaders Extreme a bit the last few weeks (well, whenever I get a chance to actually play games, that is). It’s a really, really fun [...]

Yesterday, I attended the latest GLS “Game Jam” — again, it was a lot of fun, even if the development of this game was much rockier than the previous week’s. This week’s theme was “loneliness,” and our product was a game entitled “Lonely Face,” a card game designed by me and Moses (apologies to Moses [...]

I don’t post about music very much anymore, not because I’m not listening to anything, but because I feel like since I hit my mid-thirties, I’m always (at best) a few months behind everyone else. Oh well, I’ll thrown caution to the wind and talk a little bit about a genre of music that I’ve [...]

Lately, I’ve been interested in novel approaches to teaching interactive media. I’ve been looking (from afar) at how Jason Mittell (television and media scholar at Middlebury College and a fellow product of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been “teaching The Wire“ this semester, conducting a fascinating pedagogical experiment — how does one teach long-form media, [...]

I’ve been on the hunt for good, prescriptive game design books — I know many of the current big name texts (Crawford’s, Fullerton’s, Salen & Zimmerman, etc.), and was happy to recently hear about Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. My interest was recently piqued thanks to an interesting rave [...]