From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games

Islamogaming in CGW

Hey readers—check out a new essay I wrote for September's Computer Gaming World on videogames in the Islamic world. It includes an interview with Radwan Kasmiya of Afkar Media, Damascus-based makers of Under Ash, Underseige and the upcoming strategy title Quraish.

Link: Islamogaming - Looking for Videogames in the Muslim World from Computer Gaming World.

Also, if you pick up the print edition, there's a piece by Matt Peckham called "Guns and Roses" about Joseph DeLappe's online anti-war protests inside of America's Army.

In other news, I did this nice talk with the creator of Small World Podcast that went up today.

Zen for Pong

I like this academic essay by Jason Wilson paralleling the achievements of video art pioneer Nam June Paik with those of Ralph Baer, the grandfather of Pong.* An inspired comparison.

...like Paik’s TV artworks, Pong transforms the TV from a receptive, broadcast oriented ‘window on the world’ into a monitor for local, participatory activities. This is the first mass technology which, parallel to TV, turns TV into a monitor, and remakes it as part of a modular system, whose images are open to alteration by means of local technologies and actions. The consequences of this resonate still, not only in game design, but throughout our entire contemporary systems of leisure and work, including the field of production called new media art.

It's posted as part of the exhibition Pong Mythos, produced by Berlin's Computerspeile Museum.

Link: selectparks - Belated Pong Mythos Coverage at Leipzig.

*(Ok, if you want a war connection so it fits on this blog: Baer developed his TV Game while working for Sanders Associates, a military contracting firm.)

The Believer Games Issue

Check it out: the new issue of The Believer is game-themed, and includes an adapted excerpt from From Sun Tzu to Xbox.

Also: Paul Lafarge's journey to play Dungeons & Dragons with E. Gary Gygax (!), Joshuah Bearman on artist Mark Allen (late of C-Level) and William Poundstone on "the incredible racist advertising puzzles of Sam Loyd."

For most articles you gotta buy the mag, but Christopher R. Beha's piece on language-gamers Oulipo is fully online.

(Thanks to Ed Park of The Dizzies who Dungeon-Mastered the issue!)

Link: The Believer - September 2006.