Ian Bogost, Assistant Professor

The Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture

Three Expertise Keywords:
criticism, Ecology-of-Games, platform-studies, rhetoric

Recent Posts:

Description of Current Work:

My research focuses on videogames as cultural artifacts. In particular, I’m interested in a kind of game criticism that contextualizes games in the long history of human expression, and game rhetoric, or how games make arguments. These two subjects are the respective topics of my first two books, Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism and Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, both from the MIT Press. Much of my work concerns the uses of videogames outside entertainment, including politics, advertising, learning, and art. But I’m also very interested in mainstream commercial videogames and historical approaches to videogames. I write frequently in the videogame trade press, and I also co-edit (with Gonzalo Frasca) Water Cooler Games, a popular website on videogames with an agenda.  More recently, I’ve been looking at on the way hardware and software platforms influence creative practice. Nick Montfort and I are co-editing a book series on this topic called Platform Studies, and we’re writing the first book in that series, about the Atari 2600. I’m fascinated to the point of obsession with the Atari, and I often use it in teaching and in my own artistic practice.

Selected Publications/Projects/Articles/Press:

Book: Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press, 2007) Book: Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press, 2006)

“The Rhetoric of Video Games”, MacArthur Series Volume The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning
Download article here: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/dmal.9780262693646.117