Dust and Kitten Sneezes: A Treatise

Oh gosh. Oh jeez. How long ‘as it been since I posted here? I’m picturing a search engine startup that ranks sites on the dust they’ve collected. Maybe driving the point home with a rating system based on Hello-Kitty-style, sneezing kittens. Maybe pictures of actual sneezing kittens, we’ll send it to focus testing. The point is: the less activity, the higher the allergic reaction. We’d call it sneezekitten.com.

Censorship of Rock: Frank Zappa (1986)

I really enjoyed this 1986 episode of Crossfire, featuring Frank Zappa defending against the moral panic aimed at rock music.

Sweet Ass Picture

This weekend I helped my dad to clean up an article on his campaign to sail for the USA in the 1976 Olympics. My mom helped, too. In going through some old pictures, she found this picture of me, conjuring some of my earliest prose.

Media Effects Curriculum

I want to bounce ideas off of teachers who've worked teaching media effects, most especially game effects.

We're running into the last month before finals at DigiPen, and I'm curious. Obviously there were major themes that I could pull from the book, communication classes and my own coursework. Most influential there was probably Aaron Delwiche's courses, the ones that first got me interested in media effects. In covering a lot of the ethical issues in media, especially propaganda, privacy, piracy, addiction and so on, I don't know. It was one of the first classes that I really cared about. Bad to say since I'd taken so many before, right?

But obviously most every journalism program has a media and ethics course. But I wasn't teaching media and ethics to the purported defenders of information. Or to communications students. The audience was 35 highly-talented artists, most Seniors, and most of whom are already gainfully employed making media. There were things that seemed to work extremely well in teaching not just the standard stuff: philosophy of ethics and issues of media ownership, privacy, piracy and so on. Adding in real, physical effects seems to make a lot of sense. Some of what we've discussed involves immersion, the mind and brain, violence, addiction, child development, literacy and learning, media legitimacy and so forth. Some of the guest speakers were accomplished clinical psychotherapists. I'm not certain what the final verdict would be, but it seems that we're having a lot of fun.

My question is whether there's enough information to warrant education on media effects generally. What, of the information, do we use? My hope is that over the next few years we can begin building better curricula - not just for media creators or for college students.

Healthy or unhealthy media use affects nutrition, happiness (or depression), and a range of other quality of life factors. There are thousands of books out there on good eating and exercise - or what happens when you miss out on that. Hardly anyone is talking about good media use. And there doesn't seem to be much organization or formal agreement on what, if anything, we should be talking about.

What should we be talking about?

Proofs

I just picked up my editor's proofs, for Game Addiction, Thursday night. I was frankly a little worried. I've never gone through an editor's comments for a book, and I'd heard horror stories. Reading these proofs was a pleasant, pleasant surprise. The edited copy flows, matching my style extremely well.



More than that, I was worried that my writing, especially when critiquing the ideas of other researchers, could have come off as overly acerbic. I can be a dick sometimes. And its bad, because in a venue where neutrality and respect of ideas is prized, I can be most critical of videogame research that doesn't make sense. See [example] of terrible ideas that [influence millions]. My editor did an amazing job of smoothing me out. It was something that took me by surprise; it was humbling to see the typesetting and overall texture of the book. Having it there in front of me.

While the editor also took out small bits of my wacky flair, the important pieces stayed. As did the important jokes, interviews, points and criticisms.

Yay.

Also, from what I hear from the publisher, this means that an actual publish date is not too far away.

Yaay.

New Gamasutra Article on Videogame Regulation

I've been busy. A bit too busy to post.

I wanted to mention a couple of updates that I can't put off any longer.

First off, I've got a new article up - on Gamasutra again. It's an inclusive piece on Videogame Regulation. As usual it was an interesting topic - with interesting interviewees and twists. Get at it [here].

Second off, I've started a lecturing position at the DigiPen Institute of Technology, a four year college that specializes in the instruction of game designers. It's been fun. The course is Media and Ethics. There's necessarily a lot of ground to cover, and the first few days of ethics have been fast, though the students are good -- and I think they'll like where the course is headed.

That's it for now, it's been another long day.

Switching from Wordpress to Blogger

Surprise!

I've been meaning to move my personal blog to blogger for a few months now. There are a few issues I've had with hosting my own wordpress - keeping my widgets up-to-date, losing data and other technical frustrations. So far things seem somewhat less rich with blogger, but much more straightforward.

Since submitting the manuscript to my publisher this month, there's been a chilling absence of writing in my life. Sure, the manuscript still needs constant care and feeding. I've looked over a couple of things and written up some marketing copy. Lately I've entertained the wild notion of churning out a goofy novel for November - NaNoWriMo.

Things are falling into place work-wise. It looks like I'll be lecturing here in the Northwest come Spring. I'll post some more details on that once all of the paperwork and whatnot is fleshed out.

Here I am, soaking in a grey day in Gig Harbor, Washington:

Here's a picture of the harbor: