Link Blog
Ian Bogosts’ Appearance on The Colbert Report
“Ian appeared as a guest on The Colbert Report on Tuesday August 7. A lot of his friends and colleagues have been asking the same questions, so he thought he would try to cover them all in one place”
Hacking Starbucks - Where to learn about the ghetto latte
“Simon also has a great take on the oft-mocked “half-decaf no whip” language. The Starbucks lingo capitalizes on an America filled with people who are “desperate for belonging,” he says, and Starbucks is in the business of creating a community of belonging. That’s why the baristas ask us for our names, and also why we should question that small swell of pride we feel when we correctly order our venti soy no water 20 pump chai.”
Coding Horror: Is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk a Failure?
“The theory of intrinsic motivation goes a long way toward explaining why Amazon’s unpaid user reviews are so popular and effective, and yet the paid Mechanical Turk service appears to be withering on the vine.”
A Hipper Crowd of Shushers - New York Times
Yes, the article contains the obligatory reference to “Party Girl.”
Unit Operations - An Approach to Videogame Criticism
“Ian argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and
computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to
analyze any medium–from videogames to poetry, literature, cinema, or
art–can be read as a configurative system of discrete, interlocking
units of meaning, and he illustrates this method of analysis with
examples from all these fields. The marriage of literary theory and
information technology, he argues, will help humanists take technology
more seriously and hep technologists better understand software and
videogames as cultural artifacts. This approach is especially useful for
the comparative analysis of digital and nondigital artifacts and allows
scholars from other fields who are interested in studying videogames to
avoid the esoteric isolation of “game studies.”
