Hi, I'm Ian Bogost. I am a videogame researcher, critic, and designer, as well as an author and an entrepreneur. I am a professor at Georgia Tech (a university), a Founding Partner at Persuasive Games (a videogame studio), and a Board Member at Open Texture (an educational publisher).
In my academic life, I am Assistant Professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology, where I work in the School of Literature Communication and Culture. I am also affiliated faculty at the College of Computing's GVU Center. At Georgia Tech, I teach in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media.
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.
I am the co-founder of Persuasive Games, an award-winning independent videogame studio that makes games about social and political issues. Our work covers a wide variety of topics not usually found in videogames, including airport security, disaffected copy store workers, global petroleum market, Christmas shopping, tort reform, suburban errands. Our games have been played by millions of people and exhibited internationally at venues including Laboral Centro de Arte (Madrid), Fournos Centre for Digital Culture (Athens), Eyebeam Center (New York), Slamdance Guerilla Game Festival (Park City), the Israeli Center for Digital Art (Holon) and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne).
We also create games for advertising, learning, corporate training, and politics. Our clients have included Dominos Pizza, Cisco, Chrysler/Jeep, and Cold Stone Creamery.
Persuasive Games is currently focusing on "newsgames," a genre that blends videogames with editorial cartoons. In mid 2007 we announced a publishing relationship with The New York Times, who runs our games in the op-ed section of their TimesSelect subscription service. We're also completing a game about the politics of nutrition called Fatworld, commissioned by PBS and the iTVS.
I'm also a co-founder of a small educational publishing company called Open Texture. We develop and publish cross-media education and enrichment materials for families. We've sold thousands of books all around the world, and our products are distributed into all the major booksellers.
Most recently, we've published an ancient Greek curriculum suitable for anyone, from kids as young as 2nd or 3rd grade up through adults. I leant my voice to the Elementary Greek series, reading the audio companions for all three years of the course.
Many of our customers home school or use other forms of alternative education, something we do in my house too and which I have talked about in my work.
In the past I've worked in financial services, graphic design, advertising, technology, business consulting, and entertainment. I was CTO of an interactive studio in Los Angeles during "Bubble 1.0." Before I settled down to do my dissertation on videogame criticism, I was a scholar of poetry, mostly European modern, contemporary American, and Greek Lyric. I have a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA.
Currently I live in Atlanta with my wife Abbey and my two kids Tristan and Flannery. We have more books than we can store, a dozen or so videogame consoles, and no VCR.
|
.gif)
