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 [...]

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) [...]

It’s been a long road, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve accepted a position as the School of Education, Health, and Society C. Michael Armstrong Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It’s an endowed, tenure-track, joint position between the School of Education, Health, and Society (EHS) and Miami’s Armstrong Interactive Media Studies [...]

Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I’m taking a brief break between major writing projects to pop in on the blog and let you all know that I’m still alive. It’s been a rather busy few weeks, and looks to continue to be that way until the end of the holidays. I suppose it’s quite telling that, in this [...]

Recently, I attended the first meeting of the semester for the “Pragmatics & Poetics Reading Group” here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by UW-Milwaukee anthropology professor Thomas Malaby. We began with William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience and, while not the favorite James text of mine (I prefer the Principles of [...]

This has been a particularly blah, grey, rainy morning, so I’ve spent more time than usual poking around blogs and cleaning out my Google Reader. Oh, before I forget, here’s another plug for my shared items from Google Reader — this, and my Twitter, are really my “blogs” these days (serving up links to [...]