A Lunch BIT from Racing the Beam by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost

March 6, 2014

Before Xbox, Playstation, Wii, and even Nintendo, there was the Atari Video Computer System, known simply as Atari. Gamers of the 1970s and 80s will recall countless hours spent entranced before dots bouncing across their monitors while playing early video games like Breakout and Combat on this pioneering console. In their book, Racing the Beam, the inaugural volume in the MIT Press’s Platform Studies series, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost investigate game systems’ underlying computing, developing a critical approach that examines the relationship between platforms and creative expression. 

Five Minutes with Raiford Guins

March 5, 2014

Sweeping history. Grand history. Neatly packaged narratives of greatness and genius inventors. All of these are the stuff of what Walter Benjamin labeled the “epic element in history”, historiography premised upon continuity and stability, and most firmly what Game After is not about. Instead, I map the “slips”, “slides”, “leaps” and “springing” of game objects across their life histories as they pass through different situations that inform their meaning and their value.

A Lunch BIT from The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich

March 4, 2014

In the wake of Sunday’s Academy Awards where movies using CGI like Gravity and Frozen were big winners, our lunch bit is “The Illusions” from Lev Manovich’s influential The Language of New Media. In “The Illusions”, Manovich critiqued the shift from traditional cinematography to usage of computers to generate images used in films. According to Manovich, this is important in New Media studies because before the wide spread usage of computers in films, one looked at an image and judged it on its appearance—how real it looked, but with new media the paradigms for judgment of illusions have changed. Here’s what he has to say about the expansion of analysis of this new technology:

Five Minutes with Franklin Portugal

The year was 1968 and Marshall Nirenberg, an unassuming governement scientist working at the National Institutes of Health, had just won the Nobel Prize for cracking the genetic code. Franklin Portugal’s The Least Likely Man tells the story of how Nirenberg beat other world-famous scientists in the race to this important discovery. Franklin Portugal discusses his new book and Nirenberg’s enduring legacy.

A Lunch BIT from Consciousness by Christof Koch

February 28, 2014

Christof Koch has devoted much of his career to bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the physics of the brain and phenomenal experience. His 2012 book Consciousness represented a new and unusually personal attempt to get at these questions—part scientific overview, part memoir, part futurist speculation. Part of the story he tells about his own progress was feeling caught between two intellectual frameworks—one spiritual, the other scientific:

Five Minutes with Mitchell Glickstein

February 27, 2014

Our latest “Five Minutes” series features Mitchell Glickstein, author of Neuroscience: A Historical Introduction.

A Lunch BIT from Korea’s Online Gaming Empire by Dal Yong Jin

February 26, 2014

Why is online gaming such a cultural phenomenon in Korea?  Since the 1960s Korean culture has been seen as one to quickly change and to keep up with the latest technologies and consumer products. Gaming is no different—gaming in Korea has really spearheaded the industry globally and become one of the fastest creative industries worldwide. In Korea’s Online Gaming Empire, Dal Yong Jin takes an interesting approach and examines the rapid growth of this industry in social, cultural, and economic terms.

014 Irrawaddy Literary Festival: China’s Vanishing Worlds

February 25, 2014

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A Lunch BIT from Eco-Business by Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister

February 18, 2014

What’s behind the high-profile efforts of large corporations to embrace sustainable policies? Why are these big-brand companies making zero-waste and sustainable-packaging promises? Why do they seem to be accelerating their efforts? Is this merely crafty marketing? Are they using feel-good rhetoric to placate governments, activists, and consumers?

A Lunch BIT from Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem by Mark Balaguer

February 9, 2014

​​​​​​​Do human beings possess free will? Are all events causally determined by prior events? Is free will incompatible with determinism? Philosophers and scholars have long pondered these questions, and the debate has continued to evolve in recent years.