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Today marks the 43rd anniversary of Stewart Brand's "Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums," a piece that first appeared in Rolling Stone issue 123. It's a delightful missive from an accelerating Information Age, both a simple a dispatch from the bowels of the computer lab and an elaborate pean to the hacker ethic. In typical breathless style, Brand reports on what's happening at campuses around the country: "Reliably, at any nighttime moment (i.e. non-business ho...

Recently an email about a new open source genetics research initiative appeared in my university inbox. Two scientists had seen me riff on open science and thought I might be interested in writing something about the effort. I was. The resultant article appeared on Opensource.com yesterday as "For UNC scientists, open source is the way forward." I really couldn't be happier with the way it turned out. ...

My article, "How to Play Games of Truth," recently appeared in a special issue of Syllabus devoted to "teaching with and about video games." Editors Jennifer deWinter and Carly A. Kocurek have assembled an outstanding resource for anyone interested not only in teaching in game studies but also in using games to create unique educational experiences across the curriculum. In keeping with the journal's open access policy, my article is available for download without restriction. ...

In August I agreed to an interview about my open source setup and workflow for Steve Ovadia's My Linux Rig. It appeared online this week, and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out. ...

I recently received notice that New Media & Society has assigned my article on "player-centric" game studies to an issue of the journal. It'll be part of Volume 15, Issue 6. This is welcome news for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that others can now properly cite the piece. Like other major journal publishers, Sage has implemented an "online first" publishing system, which allows editors to post electronic versions of finished articles online long before the pieces see "pri...

An article I recently wrote about theoretical and methodological trends in video game studies, "The active audience, again: Player-centric game studies and the problem of binarism," has been published in New Media & Society. Here's the abstract: This article intervenes in video game studies' recent turn to (and enthusiasm for) player-centered approaches to understanding video games' social, cultural, political, and economic implications. Such approaches repudiate ostensibly formalist or "s...