Tip of the Quill: A Journal

Category Archives: Academia

@C3: Metafun for Metaplayers.

Over at the C3 blog, I’ve just posted a quick write-up (with photos!) of Bruce Sterling’s excellent keynote lecture at the 2008 Austin Game Developers Conference. You can find the entry under the title Metafun for Metaplayers.

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Building the Storyweb of Things.

I’m seriously stimulated by all this talk about the Internet of Things, particularly these talks from PICNIC, which led in part to this post from Bruce Sterling, which references this RFID-enabled wine rack, this wooden bowl (which I swear I first saw done in Hiroshi Ishii’s Tangible Media group at the Media Lab), this nifty […]

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Announcing Eludamos Volume 2, Number 2.

I’d like to announce the release of Eludamos, the Journal for Computer Game Culture, which is now available for reading online as HTML or downloading as a PDF at eludamos.org. The table of contents for this issue includes: An introduction by Gareth Schott “Using Literary Theory to Read Games: Power, Ideology, and Repression in Atlus’ […]

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Moving into the Cloud.

(The following is a draft of an essay I’m kicking around and will probably post over at the C3 blog. I’d appreciate your thoughts and comments – it’s less of a blue-sky thinking piece and more of a clarification and “this is what I’m doing in this space” piece, so it’s a little different from […]

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Greece 2008 Part III: Athens.

I carry a small black Moleskine with me at all times with five colored pens clipped to its outside: black, red, green, blue and purple. Every week I recopy my to-do list from an old page to a new page, gritting my teeth and grumbling as I transcribe all the stuff that I’m meaning to […]

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Possible business models for Twitter?

This afternoon a very cool thing happened – my Twitter account was friended by the Twitter account for the University of Minnesota Press. Now, to a forward-thinking academic like me, this is not only very cool, it’s incredibly cool – and for multiple reasons. First, the fact that they friended me leaves me with a […]

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Greetings from sunny L.A.

This weekend I’m in bright, sunny Los Angeles, staying with my friends Talon and Sara and presenting at the SIGGRAPH Sandbox Conference, where I’ll be conducting a transmedia storytelling workshop first thing tomorrow morning. I’m having a great time so far – I slept a ton last night between the six hours on the plane […]

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Music, cultural theorists and the late work of Groucho Marx.

Ken, this one’s for you, coming courtesy of a link in Journalista! and WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. In 1969, ABC had a musical variety TV show called Music Scene. When the show ended, they got a very special co-host: the 79-year-old Groucho Marx. Sporting an absolutely amazing hat straight from an MIT graduation, he […]

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Greece 2008 Part II: ITRA World Congress.

While a big motivator for our trip to Greece was the desire to actually see Greece and its islands, the real catalyst for the trip was the 5th World Congress of the International Toy Researchers’ Association (ITRA), a group of which I am now a proud member. If you’d told me that such an organization […]

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My favorite grade card.

Ho. Lee. Cats. Some of you might remember that I TA’ed the Interactive Narrative course in the 2008-2009 academic year for Professor Ed Barrett. This was a huge amount of fun and I enjoyed every moment of it, as I usually do with teaching. It was massively educational, even though I didn’t get paid and […]

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