Ian Bogost Concepts

Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System

by Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost · 9 Jan 2009

Montfort, editors Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System, Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost, 2009 Racing the Beam The Atari Video Computer System Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2009 Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form

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the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Montfort, Nick. Racing the beam : the Atari video computer system / Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost. p. cm — (Platform studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01257-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Video games—Equipment and supplies. 2

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Game Criticism conference at Princeton University on 6 March 2004. This conference prompted the ﬁrst scholarship leading to this book. Thanks also to students in Ian Bogost’s Videogame Design and Analysis class on the Atari VCS (Georgia Tech, Spring 2007): Michael Biggs, Sarah Clark, Rob Fitzpatrick, Mark Nelson, Nirmal Patel, Wes

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in the area to design Atari VCS games. Both of the authors of this book have had students play and analyze games on the system; Ian Bogost has also had them program their own original games in Batari BASIC and assembly.3 The inﬂuence of the Atari VCS continues to be recognized

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing

by Ed Finn · 10 Mar 2017 · 285pp · 86,853 words

a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship we have with algorithms today. Writing in The Atlantic in early 2015, digital culture critic and game designer Ian Bogost called out our increasingly mythological relationship with software in an article titled “The Cathedral of Computation.” Bogost argues that we have fallen into a “computational

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and abstracting, creating an interface layer between consumers and the messy process of, say, getting a cab or hiring a housekeeper. Chapter 4 begins with Ian Bogost’s satirical Facebook game Cow Clicker and its send-up of the “gamification” movement to add quantification and algorithmic thinking to many facets of everyday

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same techno-utopian notes as the mythos of code as magic when they equate computation with transformational justice and freedom. The theology of computation that Ian Bogost identified is a faith militant, bringing the gospel of big data and disruption to huge swaths of society. This is the context in which we

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the proverbial black box, the culture machine is actually porous, ingesting and extruding cultural and computational structures at every connection point with other sociotechnical systems. Ian Bogost, from the “Cathedral of Computation”: Once you start looking at them closely, every algorithm betrays the myth of unitary simplicity and computational purity. … Once you

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on a path to consruct a new creative ontology by identifying the building blocks of their content and the patterns behind them. Alexis Madrigal and Ian Bogost published an extensive analysis of Yellin’s work in The Atlantic, unearthing a remarkable new algorithmic system that made a science of the complex diversity

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amount of their attention and cash. In the extreme, they can foster forms of addiction that approach the personal destruction of drugs and alcohol.9 Ian Bogost has been a persistent critic of gamification, arguing that it should be reframed as “exploitationware” for its abuse of human susceptibility to manipulation by cynical

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. Figure 3.4: Screenshot of House of Cards opening credits: a city devoid of people. Source: Netflix. Figure 4.1: Cow Clicker Screenshot. Courtesy of Ian Bogost, http://bogost.com/games/cow_clicker/. Figure 4.2: The cartoon maps Uber provides for its drivers and passengers via the Google Play Store. Figure

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

by Evgeny Morozov · 15 Nov 2013 · 606pp · 157,120 words

by their reward systems. Virtual points do not produce experiences “of interest, enlightenment, terror, fascination, hope, or any number of other sensations,” as game theorist Ian Bogost puts it; rather, those are produced by the content of the game and various narrative strategies adopted by game designers. In other words, one doesn

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be blind to the fact that such enjoyment might have distracted them from realizing just how awful and grueling their working conditions were. Gaming theorist Ian Bogost, who is perhaps the most vehement critic of gamification, makes this point forcefully in a provocative essay—with the self-explanatory title of “Shit Crayons

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put to use is likely to produce fun-seeking but docile citizens who will never question anything unless promised a golden badge. As game theorist Ian Bogost has shown in Persuasive Games, games that seek to persuade without allowing players to deliberate are just another form of coercion—perhaps of the soft

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like family income, access to healthy food, or the risks of jogging around the neighborhood. Now, contrast Zamzee with a game like Fatworld developed by Ian Bogost. Unlike Zamzee, which takes place entirely in the real world, Fatworld is a more conventional effort that takes place entirely in a virtual world of

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with the very possibility of dignity. Other thinkers have also recognized the importance of processes, frameworks, and procedures in enabling human flourishing and democratic debate. Ian Bogost, writing on video games, notes that rather than their content, what he calls their “procedural logic” is most conducive to deliberation. “Procedural media like videogames

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Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 28. 20 they can do so many other things in so many different ways: see Ian Bogost, How to Do Things with Videogames (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 20 “My interest is description, not prescription”: Felix Gillette, “Feats of Clay,” New

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,” The Guardian, March 14, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/mar/14/sxsw-2011-scvngr-seth-priebatsch. 298 “of interest, enlightenment, terror”: Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Gamasutra, May 3, 2011, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?print=1. 298 “The use of game

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16th International Academic MindTrek Conference, pp. 23–26. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2115483. 313 “A despot in a sorcerer’s hat”: Ian Bogost, “Shit Crayons,” Ian Bogost’s blog, undated, http://www.bogost.com/writing/shit_crayons.shtml. 314 “Behind the allure of the quantified self”: Gary Wolf, “The Data-Driven

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of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 334 As game theorists Ian Bogost has shown: Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 334 “But who cares about deliberation”: Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Shell Games,” Gamasutra, March 3, 2010, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132682

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

by Adam L. Alter · 15 Feb 2017 · 331pp · 96,989 words

’ games warded off cognitive decline, but the evidence was scant, and Lumos had overclaimed. Even if gamification works, some critics believe it should be abandoned. Ian Bogost, a game designer at Georgia Tech, spearheads this movement. In 2011, he delivered a talk at a gamification symposium at Wharton. He titled his talk

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alternative to traditional medical care, education, and charitable giving because, in many respects, those approaches are tone-deaf to the drivers of human motivation. But Ian Bogost was also wise to illuminate the dangers of gamification. Games like FarmVille and Kim Kardashian’s Hollywood are designed to exploit human motivation for financial

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benefit them: Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini, “A Fine Is a Price,” Journal of Legal Studies 29 (January 2000): 1–18. Bogost demonstrated the: On Ian Bogost and Cow Clicker: The game’s site: cowclicker.com; Bogost’s own description of the game: bogost.com/writing/blog/cow_clicker_1/; see also

Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

by Jane McGonigal · 20 Jan 2011 · 470pp · 128,328 words

to keep up with new security restrictions, like “no pressurized cheese,” “no pet snakes,” “no pudding cups,” and “no robots.” The game’s lead designer, Ian Bogost, is a frequent business traveler who came up with the idea for the game after suffering endless frustration in the security line himself. The game

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play it? These are questions I asked myself a few years ago, and, together with my good friend and fellow game developer Persuasive Games cofounder Ian Bogost, I decided to invent a game with the core mechanism of performing acts of kindness on strangers—as sneakily and stealthily as possible. It would

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how to increase the jen ratio of a shared space—and it can be adopted and adapted by anyone, anywhere. It was cheap to invent—Ian Bogost and I worked for free, and the whole project probably cost us less than five hundred dollars in expenses to playtest and launch. The game

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on EVOKE; Jamais Cascio and Kathi Vian on Superstruct; Ken Eklund and Cathy Fischer on World Without Oil; Greg Niemeyer and Ken Goldberg on Bounce; Ian Bogost on Cruel 2 B Kind; Julie Channing, Edwin Veelo, Toria Emery, and all the global puppet masters on The Lost Ring; and Elan Lee on

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at http://vimeo.com/1204230. CRUEL 2 B KIND (Chapter 10) A short documentary of the game of benevolent assassination, created by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost, is available at www.cruelgame.com , where you can also download a kit for running your own Cruel 2 B Kind game. DAY IN THE

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

by Nir Eyal · 26 Dec 2013 · 199pp · 43,653 words

them to bed.2 When they wake up, they check for notifications, tweets, and updates, sometimes even before saying “Good morning” to their loved ones. Ian Bogost, the famed game creator and professor, calls the wave of habit-forming technologies the “cigarette of this century” and warns of their equally addictive and

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drug dealers offer users a good time, but when the addiction takes hold, the fun stops. In a satirical take on Zynga’s FarmVille franchise, Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, a Facebook game in which users did nothing but incessantly click on virtual cows to hear a satisfying moo.11 Bogost intended

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.ssrn.com/abstract=1583509. 2. Charlie White, “Survey: Cellphones vs. Sex—Which Wins?,” Mashable (accessed), http://mashable.com/2011/08/03/telenav-cellphone-infographic. 3. Ian Bogost, “The Cigarette of This Century,” Atlantic (June 6, 2012), http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-cigarette-of-this-century/258092/. 4. David

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Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire Became a Videogame Hit,” Wired (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker. 12. Ian Bogost, “Cowpocalypse Now: The Cows Have Been Raptured,” Bogost.com (accessed Nov. 13, 2013), http://www.bogost.com/blog/cowpocalypse_now.shtml Chapter 7: Case Study

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression

by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean · 9 Nov 2012

operation of the computer or machine in executing the instructions. The procedure is also ideological, as computational processes operate like other rhetorical strategies, something that Ian Bogost’s phrase “procedural rhetoric” makes clear in describing how computational processes (like good speeches) model persuasion in systems involving the interpretation of any symbolic system

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to Bataille’s notion of “general economy” where expenditure (waste, sacrifice, or destruction) is considered more fundamental than the economies of production and utilities. 44. Ian Bogost, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), making reference to the work of Graham Harman in particular and what has

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. Notes to Pages 41–43 119 6. Hannah Arendt, “Labor, Work, Action” (1964), in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin 2000), 167–181. 7. Ian Bogost, “Procedural Rhetoric,” in Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 5. Bogost develops the idea of “unit operations” from this

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All

by Adrian Hon · 14 Sep 2022 · 371pp · 107,141 words

cost to add gamification to your new app, why not try it? That’s why you’ll spot generic gamification almost anywhere you look. Dr. Ian Bogost, game designer and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has noted that gamification’s apparent simplicity and smoothness has led people to believe

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them they’re part of a greater mission. They call workers “industrial athletes” and ask them for their loyalty, but as academic and game designer Ian Bogost has noted, “They reciprocate that loyalty with shams, counterfeit incentives that neither provide value nor require investment.”27 The sham is the baubles of gamification

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diet plans or brain training regimens. Indulgences weren’t accepted by everyone. Long before Luther, indulgences were criticised and even parodied, much as commentators like Ian Bogost and TV shows like Black Mirror have done for gamification. From the fourteenth century, John Wyclif and the Lollards criticised indulgences for their commodification (in

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=true. 11. Kevin Kelly, “Healthvault, Phase 1,” Quantified Self, October 8, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20130117170255/https://quantifiedself.com/2007/page/3. 12. Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Game Developer, May 3, 2011, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?print=1. 13. Kohn, Punished by Rewards

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do this to us,” r/AmazonFC, Reddit, May 7, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFC/comments/n6xh1c/why_do_they_do_this_to_us. 27. Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Game Developer, May 3, 2011, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?print=1; Edward Ongweso Jr., “Amazon Calls

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words

they amass their wealth. They believe that, fundamentally, they know what’s best for society: Their view is “trust us,” as the philosopher and technologist Ian Bogost says. And of course, it’s a redistributionist view that leaves their political power intact. Workers getting handouts from a small coterie of stratospherically wealthy

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kids, Minecraft wasn’t just a game. It was this generation’s “personal computer,” their Commodore 64, as my friend the philosopher and game designer Ian Bogost once noted. It was the machine that let them peel back the curtain, see how digital stuff was really made, and start making it themselves

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and conversation. That includes Max Whitney, Fred Benenson, Tom Igoe, Michelle Tepper, Saron Yitbarek, Katrina Owens, Cathy Pearl, Tim O’Reilly, Caroline Sinders, Heather Gold, Ian Bogost, Marie Hicks, Anil Dash, Robin Sloan, danah boyd, Bret Dawson, Evan Selinger, Gary Marcus, Gabriella Coleman, Greg Baugues, Holden Karau, Jessica Lam, Karla Starr, Mike

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, 2016, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/2016-election-day/silicon-valley-donated-60-times-more-clinton-trump-n679156. philosopher and technologist Ian Bogost says: Alexis C. Madrigal, “What Should We Call Silicon Valley’s Unique Politics?,” The Atlantic, September 7, 2017, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.theatlantic

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, “Please Don’t Learn to Code,” Coding Horror (blog), May 15, 2012, accessed August 21, 2018, https://blog.codinghorror.com/please-dont-learn-to-code/. Ian Bogost once noted: Clive Thompson, “The Minecraft Generation,” New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2016, accessed August 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension

by Samuel Arbesman · 18 Jul 2016 · 222pp · 53,317 words

fear of the unknown. Others tend toward an almost religious reverence when faced with technology’s beauty and power. The video game designer and writer Ian Bogost has even suggested that replacing the term “algorithm” with the word “God” changes little of what is being said about technology in today’s discourse

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_facebook_s_news_feed_algorithm_works.html. because of its creation by some perfect, infinite mind: “The worship of the algorithm” is discussed further in Ian Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/. CHAPTER 1: WELCOME

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Marcelo Gleiser, The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (New York: Basic Books, 2014). video game designer and writer Ian Bogost: Ian Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation,” The Atlantic, January 15, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/. a perfect and