It’s a little late in the game for me to start reviewing episodes of Lost on this site with there being only two or three episodes to go, depending on how you cut it. But last night’s episode was such a significant piece of the show’s mythology and worked for me on so many levels, [...]

I don’t normally write about television here as, well, I barely watch it anymore. But as we’re now at the midway point of the final season of Lost, I thought I’d put down a few random thoughts I’ve had recently regarding Lost and games. In graduate school the last several years, Lost was one of [...]

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 [...]

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 (AIMS) [...]

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, not [...]

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’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 day and [...]