Writers I Like

Paul Beatty on Obama:

Yes, I know that after his resounding victory in the Iowa caucus, pundits decided that Barack's win proved that race was of political inconsequence, but I bet that they thought the same thing the day after O.J. Simpson was arrested.

Colson Whitehead on the Brooklyn Writer Mystique:

What do they expect me to say? “Instead of ink, I write in mustard from Nathan’s Famous, a Brooklyn institution since 1916.” “I built my desk out of wooden planks taken from the authentic rubble of Ebbets Field. Have I mentioned how I still haven’t forgiven the Dodgers for moving to Los Angeles?”

Ta-Nehisi Coates on writing his memoir (his blog is a must-read, btw):

Ah well, I can remember cats coming to school the next day bragging about how Humpty ripped it on that "the underground's down for peace among brothers" (how is it that him and Shock G are on stage together). But all I remember watching this clip was that the dark-skin chick in Oaktown 357 was a stunner. We'll get Juicy Got You Crazy in here at some point. No pubescent boy should have seen that video.

Haitian Cogitation

The latest edition of my Thought/Process column went live at Crispy Gamer. In this edition, I talk abut why it's hard to get a sense of auteurship out of video game development and some games that I think verge on the artistic. It's a brain-twisting premise, but I'm pretty proud of at least attempting to tweak the lens through which we look at video games.

A quick excerpt:

The thing about game development is that it's still a market-driven mode of creativity, and it's creativity by committee. As such, it's hard to build a body of work that evinces a particular aesthetic, a sense of where the creators' head/heart might be at in a moment of time. There's a reason that games like Rez get trotted out when the ongoing "Are Games Art?" argument boils over periodically. Rez and, to a degree, its EEE cousins try to alter the user's perceptions of sight and hearing. By intertwining the two senses closely, it attempts to blur the lines between the two in an effort to simulate synesthesia.

For more, follow the link: Thought/Process 002

Haitian Moderation

Last Saturday, I moderated a panel at Splat!, a graphic novel symposium. It was a last-minute set-up, with the e-mail asking me to participate coming on the preceding Wednesday. I had little prep time and the 9:00 am start time was hella early for me–especially considering it was on the weekend–but I think it went pretty well. (It's the first one on the linked page; things happened so quickly they didn't have time to update the info with my name and bio.) Of special note was that there were three black men on the panel of nerd experts, the first time any such thing has ever happened to me.

Here's a snippet from a blog post on Fleen:

In terms of presentation, the Who Reads Graphic Novels? and Webcomics: A Primer seemed to run most smoothly; this was probably a function of the panelists present and the moderators — wrangling smart, opinionated people is an art form, and Evan Narcisse and Colleen Venable just seemed to do the best job of it (it doesn’t hurt that Narcisse has both a conversational style and voice very similar to that of Elvis Mitchell).

NPR, here I come!

Haitian Representation

Here's what I've been up to, in terms of non-book stuff:

• The usual weekly Washington Post and bi-weekly Time Out Chicago game reviews keep on rolling along.


• A guest post on Level Up, N'Gai Croal's video game blog at Newsweek, just went up today. Aside from being a friend, N'Gai's one of the most well-regarded journalists working in the video game space right now and Level Up may be THE place to go for high-level critique (at least in the mainstream media) so it's very cool of him to let me play in his "house", as it were. My admittedly heady entry talks about how a solo game experience changes when it's shared, using my examples of playing Portal (below) and Assassins' Creed with a friend as a launching pad.



• Crispy Gamer, a new video game website powered by a murderer's row of freelancers including yours truly, launched about a month ago. I'm producing and moderating their podcast, Blazing Prattles, and writing Thought/Process, a monthly column of critique for the site, too. You should be able to click on my name and get a page with all my contributions so far. I'm pretty proud of the stuff I'm doing for CG so please check it out. While I was at GDC, my Crispy Gamer colleagues and I did an interview with iconic game developer Warren Spector. I kinda took the bull by the horns here and commandeered the time we had with Warren, but I feel like the resulting podcast came out great.

• Because no one demanded it, Scott Jones and I did another video game segment on the local CW affiliate (Channel 11). We talk about recent releases that are fun to play during Spring Break. You can see it here, once you scroll down a bit.

• My piece on Mat Johnson ran a few weeks ago in Time Out New York. This one was a weird tightrope to walk, since it had to talk about both Mat and his new graphic novel Incognegro. I liked Mat's writing way before I ever met him, but I didn't want the article to come off like one friend writing about another. Nevertheless, it was a fun piece to write.