TITLE FORTHCOMING: A Year in Indecision
The Middle East is a small concert venue in Central Square, a neighborhood of Cambridge, MA. The square is home to arts supply stores, vegan diners, and music game studio Harmonix, makers of Guitar Hero/Rock Band, Dance Central, and this year’s Fantasia. They sometimes hold release parties in the venue’s basement. I took the above photograph using an HTC One, a lovely phone with a lovelier camera, sent to me for the express purpose of taking pictures to accompany an article on Boston’s game development scene. This would be a “sponsored” article, you see, and readers would know this due to the small italicized disclaimer above the title.
That piece came out in December 2013 (forgive me), but the process and end result was discomfiting for what it implied: The text didn’t matter. The images did, and not even as accompaniment. I was writing accidental ad copy. I could have written “Hello” six hundred times, made my word count, and done my job, seeing as how the point was to show off a camera phone’s high resolution and little else.
I’m not sure what the point of this introduction is. But I liked the picture and wanted to use it for something personal and not a corporation’s advertorial. If I could be anyone in the mural, I’d like to be the dread-locked child held by her father, happy and hopeful for the future; if I’m being honest, I’m closer to one of the statues in the upper-right, my wooden legs unable to kick, the weight of all that glazed pine slowly making me sink.
Here are some pieces I wrote in 2014.
Will Wearables Bring Videogame Design into the Real World?
And lo, another piece of sponsored content! Intel’s iQ series may just be another attempt to get readers’ eyeballs in front of their brand, but my assignments there have given me an opportunity to talk with some amazing people. Like Dana Karwas, media artist and NYU instructor, whose project “The Satellite” uses live streams from NASA to produce a real-time vision of earth never before seen.
And Toni Dove, who combines software and clothing to create nightmare fashion such as “The Dress That Eats Souls,” an outfit laced with electrical circuitry and sensors; the dress watches passersby and mimics their movements. That the article starts with a Halo reference is a quick clue to most of my year’s work: Using videogames as a gateway into interesting questions about our larger culture…
Two5Six: A Day of Videogames and Culture and Werewolves and Donuts
…which is kind of the mission statement of Kill Screen’s annual conference called Two5Six. The point is to bring together leaders from within the game industry and without and see what happens; by putting a few people in related fields on a stage and letting them converse, they, and we, learn from one another.
You end up having Steve Gaynor, writer and designer of Gone Home, one of last year’s most intriguing game narratives, talking with Jake Barton, whose design group helped develop the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, now open at the base of the Freedom Tower. One’s work deals with a young girl’s emotional discoveries about her family; the other deals with a nation’s mourning. Both struggle with similar issues on very different scales.
I was invited to the conference in order to write an essay that encapsulated the event. This is becoming my favorite kind of assignment, and one I hope to seek out more in 2015: Go here, see what happens, write it down.
Nintendo Might Just Redefine Entertainment—Again
I’ve been on the Nintendo beat the past few years, writing about console launches, reviewing games, and considering their oft-maligned place in an industry they helped found. But this was a highlight: What started as a lark eventually was re-published on The Atlantic’s site.
Another “More of this in 2015, please!” maxim: Write about what gets you jazzed and the rest will follow.
Four Things I Learned While Writing a Book about Super Mario Bros. 2
In 2013, the fine folks at Boss Fight Books, a just-born small press out of Los Angeles, asked me to write a short tome about a videogame. The rest of that year was spent researching and writing a book called Super Mario Bros. 2. The majority of this year was spent revising the same. My weird little history/quest/travelogue finally came out this past October. I’m both ecstatic and disappointed, grateful and full of regrets. I’m sure you know the feeling.
As a freelancer, I still have little clue how to do my job effectively and well. As a person who teaches as an adjunct instructor to buy groceries, who writes and gets paid paltry sums, and who keeps thinking he should really stop all this nonsense (I won’t) and find a job in some horrifying fluorescent office (I haven’t) where the benefits will flow as if from a split vein—predictably, but with injurious consequences—I guess I’m doing okay.
You can find most of my stuff here. I hope to write here more. And for you.
In the meantime, chat me up on Twitter (@WinWinIrwin). Send recipes/job offers/babysitting gigs to jonirwin dot is at gmail dot com.
Onward to 2015!
