My post on Temple Run and the productive logic of video games is now
up on Popmatters. I chopped a section from it to include here below.
Certainly, collecting coins and points isn’t anything new in video games, and such practices are not limited to casual games. Achievements and trophies for console games seem to serve much the same purpose: providing a psychological sense of reward for playing, imbuing the player with the feeling that they are doing something useful, as if the games themselves were unworthy of our time. The accumulation of coins and achievements (or even the photographs in a game like Pokemon Snap) appears to function something like Susan Sontag’s notion of the tourist with a camera: he desperately desires to possess the world, to bring something back to his colleagues, to show to himself that “my time in leisure has not been wasted.”
That site is now the home for some of my video game writing, though I'll still be updating this page with stuff on books, education, movies, and other art, most imminently with a post on Waiting for Superman. Do hold breath.
