Author: Ben

  • Things I learnt reading climate change fiction this year

    For the second half of the year, as part of a book-length research project that I started working on, I began reading a few books, fiction mostly, to go along with my academic reading about climate change, environmentalism and renewable energy. I learnt quite a bit from these, and this is my attempt at putting […]

  • Raymond Williams with a word on climate aesthetics

      Two short excerpts from Raymond Williams’ essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ (which is nice for lots of reasons) – but these two are important things to keep in mind for climate activists and action. The first is about the working class’ relationship to (industrial/mechanical/electrical) power and the real benefit to life that it brought, which […]

  • Music criticism/game criticism

    So this was a really quite interesting essay (which I’ve come to quite late) by James Parker and Nicholas Croggon about music criticism, and I think it has interesting stuff to say to games criticism too. I’m thinking here about that piece by Anthony Burch recently that was very much a case of him retroactively […]

  • Aesthetic Seriousness

    “Over the centuries, empirical, clear thinking has become branded with the image of Default Men. They were the ones granted the opportunity, the education, the leisure, the power to put their thoughts out into the world. In people’s minds, what do professors look like? What do judges look like? What do leaders look like? The […]

  • My oral history of videogame criticism blogging 2007-2014

    So I gave this talk at Critical Proximity a couple weeks back and tried to just share some memorys from blaggin and doing CritDist. My slides are here on the CritProx website.

  • Videogame visions of a post-climate change future

    I wrote an essay on the way games have depicted climate change for Memory Insufficient. I was pretty happy with how this turned out, and the plan is to whip it up into a more fleshed out paper later in the year. I haven’t had a chance to read the other essays but if prior […]

  • Clint Hocking on sense of place and the effect on violence in Far Cry 2

    Steve Gaynor has a new Idle Thumbs offshoot podcast called Tone Control, and in this episode he talks to Clint Hocking, and they spend about the last 50 minutes talking about Far Cry 2. I wanted to excerpt this one great little quote that I think is really important. It’s from about an 1hr 10mins […]

  • Gone Home: Jump Scares and Ludonarative Harmony

    So there’s a new game out called Gone Home and I don’t have the superlatives to describe it adequately so just take my word for it and go play. It’s some trifling amount of money on steam. If you haven’t finished playing it, I advise you to stop reading this essay now and just spend […]

  • Eve Sedgwick on Paranoia

    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on paranoia, one of the best things I’ve read recently and which I’ll be incorporating into a chapter for sure. If you want to understand much of what goes on, both online and off, and particularly to do with activism, then look to understand paranoia: The first imperative of paranoia is There […]

  • [talk] Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm

    So I gave a short paper at CODE last week entitled ‘Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm’ and got lots of positive comments and questions afterwards. Here’s an embed of the audio, and here’s a direct download. The slides to accompany the talk can be found here.