In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical theory that can be used to analyze particular videogames. Moreover, this approach can be applied beyond videogames: Bogost suggests that 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...
In Unit Operations, Ian Bogost argues that similar principles underlie both literary theory and computation, proposing a literary-technical ...
In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books, music, and movies. They are increasingly used for purposes other than entertainment, yet debates about videogames still fork along one of two paths: accusations of debasement through violence and isolation or defensive paeans to their potential as serious cultural works. In How to Do Things with...
In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers n...
Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has widened our scope of inquiry to include ecosystems, animals, and artificial intelligence. Yet the vast majority of the stuff in our universe, and even in our lives, remains beyond serious philosophical concern.
In Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, Ian Bogost develops an object-oriented ontology that puts things at the center of being--a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which...
Humanity has sat at the center of philosophical thinking for too long. The recent advent of environmental philosophy and posthuman studies has wide...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Kim Adrian's Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies-- vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed.
Sock reminds us that extraordinary secrets live in mundane material realities, and shows how this floppy, often smelly, sometimes holey piece of clothing, whether machine-made or hand-knit, can also serve as...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Videogames Aren't they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk? The final victory of interaction over passivity? No, probably not. Games are part art and part appliance, part tableau and part toaster. In How to Talk about Videogames, leading critic Ian Bogost explores this paradox more thoroughly than any other author to date.
Delving into popular, familiar games like Flappy Bird, Mirror's Edge, Mario Kart, Scribblenauts, Ms. Pac-Man, FarmVille, Candy Crush Saga, Bully,...
Videogames Aren't they the medium of the twenty-first century? The new cinema? The apotheosis of art and entertainment, the realization of Wagneri...
At dinnertime: check. At a traffic light: check. In bed at the end of the day: check. In line at the coffee shop: check. In The Geek's Chihuahua, Ian Bogost addresses the modern love affair of "living with Apple" during the height of the company's market influence and technology dominance.
The ubiquitous iPhone and its kin saturate our lives, changing everything from our communication to our posture. Bogost contrasts the values of Apple's massive success in the twenty-first century with those of its rise in the twentieth. And he connects living with Apple with the phenomenon...
At dinnertime: check. At a traffic light: check. In bed at the end of the day: check. In line at the coffee shop: check. In The Geek's Chihuahua...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Smokers, survivalists, teenagers, collectors.... The cigarette lighter is a charged, complex, yet often entirely disposable object that moves across these various groups of people, acquiring and emitting different meanings while always supplying its primary function, that of ignition. While the lighter may seem at first a niche object-only for old fashioned cigarette smokers-in this book Jack Pendarvis explodes the lighter as something with deep history, as something with...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
In Doorknob, architecture and design scholar Thomas Mical explores a commonplace device that under closer scrutiny becomes a wonderful and slightly surreal mechanism of transformation. Inviting readers to look again at this everyday object, Mical shows how the doorknob can be understood as thing, as process, as transitional object, as the machine of arrival and escape, drawing upon examples from design, life, art, and mechanics.
Object Lessons is published in...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Every shelf is different and every bookshelf tells a different story. One bookshelf can creak with character in a bohemian coffee shop and another can groan with gravitas in the Library of Congress. Writer and historian Lydia Pyne finds bookshelves to be holders not just of books but of so many other things: values, vibes, and verbs that can be contained and displayed in the buildings and rooms of contemporary human existence. With a shrewd eye toward this particular...
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
