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Audio: Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind
On Wednesday the 9th of November I presented a paper to the Knowledge/Culture/Social Change International Conference at UWS Parramatta. The title of my paper was “Neuroscience, Technospectacularism and the Mind” and I recorded my talk which you can listen to below. The 29 minute recording includes some questions asked by the audience at the end […]
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On the unintended consequences of anti-snark internet culture IRL
In our era of the Internet – an era in which memes and chain emails alike cross from screen to the world and back again – has the encroachment of snark from the internet undermined our ability to properly mock those deserving of mockery in so-called meatspace? Compare and contrast two entirely unrelated pieces – the […]
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Tim Morton on climate, denial, and responsibility
The following extremely lengthy extract is from Timothy Morton’s ‘The Ecological Thought’ which is (appropriately enough) heavily influencing my current thinking, distilling a lot of background intuitions and assumptions into a more definite form. Here’s Morton, at the beginning of Chapter 3, talking about global warming. It was too compelling not to share. (Any mistakes are my […]
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The New Situationist International
I read the introductory few pages of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath The Street and was immediately inspired to organise or join an artist/philosophical collective like the Situationist International. I don’t have a great understanding of them, their goals and practices, having learnt virtually everything about them everything through reading Wikipedia, a couple of chapters […]
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A response to Dan Cook’s “blunt critique of game criticism”
NB: Since posting this piece the original post in question has been edited to remove many of the phrases I initially took aim at. As such I now feel like the fool flailing away at thin air, so thanks for doing that to me, Dan. It is, as always, his prerogative, but it’s also exactly […]
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Phonogram
I’m suffering from a hangover. A hangover induced by Phonogram – it’s actually a comic, and not the latest alcoholic beverage with an overly generous marketing budget. But a hangover is what I’ve got. My head hurts. My body hurts, and worst of all my heart hurts. Phonogram I love you, but you’re bringing me […]
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Rhetorical Questions
Initial responses to my off-hand reference to an analytic/persuasive divide in the critical videogame blogosphere ranged from incomprehension to ardent agreement, and even a blog post ‘In defence of trolling’ (about which I’m still not sure how to respond other than to say I’m flattered the author thought my ideas worth responding to). In my […]
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In Print: KillScreen
So in the middle of moving house this past week, I nearly forgot to mention that I received a copy of my first ever published piece of writing. It’s paired up with the simply amazing photography of Daniel Purvis, who went to quite an effort to go out into the landscape I was writing about […]
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An Exhausted Blogosphere
Last time we looked at the early period of the videogame blogosphere as Dan Golding’s blog post ‘Mapping the Brainysphere’ and I both saw it emerging, and we also looked at the forces of formation from an Actor Network Theory perspective. One of the things that ANT turns on its head is the idea of […]
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A brief Actor Network Theory history of the videogame blogosphere
After a very productive meeting with my PhD supervisor today I want to try distil some of the renewed focus my project has gained. My PhD project, tentatively called ‘An Actor Network Theory assessment of online community creation’, is all about the critical videogame blogosphere and how it came about. There’s a bunch of assumptions […]