Douglas Rushkoff's Blog

Nice, short, new interview with me at H+ magazine, about my new graphic novel series, eXoriare, and what it's like to write story for a video game.

I read all of these books… Pause and Effect or First Person or what's-his-name's awful books on character and storytelling for games… or Marie Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, or Hamlet on the Holodeck. All of these. And the more I read about it, the less I felt that there was a there there. This holy grail about somehow merging gameplay with...

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How We Get Past "Free" and Learn to Exchange Value Again.

Here's my keynote from the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference last week. It is my clearest articulation yet of how we're using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy. This is a lot of what I wanted to talk about at the New School's "Internet as Playground and Factory" last week.

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As unlikely as it sounds, Rupert Murdoch may end up being our last best hope for a peaceful solution to the Internet's war on professional journalism. A man who many blame for commodifying, globalizing, sensationalizing, and cheapening news is considering taking a stand against a force even bigger than himself: the Web link.

more at the Daily Beast

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So, both for fun and in my ongoing effort to find a university homebase, I'm going to teach a course called Narrative Lab at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program next semester. You have to be in the program to take it, but I'll try to keep some component online for the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, though, here's an example of me actually doing interactive narrative – and a newspaper writer, from the Guardian (of course), who seems to totally grok what it is we're after:

But a...

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I just finished a new graphic novel – the first in a series I'm working on that will dig a reality tunnel through the universe of a video game series. Crazy stuff, but I'm the linear guy on the project (if you can believe that) so it's not quite as brain-decimating as it could be.

Here's the preview, along with a trailhead:

http://exoriare.com/

It should be available as a printed volume of 120 pages or so in a few months.

Writing for gamers is harder than writing for regular people because I...

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Robert Anton Wilson will be my guest on The Media Squat this Monday evening.

Alas, he'll be visiting via magnetic recording tape, and not in the flesh. He's the next in our series of Media Squat Classics – people whose ideas and approaches form the basis of the media squat ethos.

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I'm doing a "live" appearance in Second Life, this Sunday evening at 9p Eastern, for CopperRobot.

We'll be talking about Life Inc, especially in the context of how people create value on the net – and whether there's a way for any significant number of us to make a living at it, anymore.

If you don't go to Second Life, you can also watch it as live video on the web.

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Following my own advice to go local, I'm ready to settle down in a real place and time. I'm hoping that will be teaching media, interactivity, and narrative in a friendly, NY-area program that offers me a place to do it in an ongoing way. Strange to have a moment of "openness" like this.

To that end, I'm doing talks at some of my favorite schools in the area, to meet people and let my intentions be known. Two weeks ago, I had a great time at the New School – where I was truly inspired by the ...

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The PBS Digital Nation team just completed a great new segment on the predator drones being used in Pakistan and Afghanistan. This documentary (I'm one of the writers and commentators) is actually shaping up to be pretty interesting. Here's my Daily Beast column on some of the issues underlying the use of virtual fighting machines.

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I hope everyone who reads my posts already understands that the real beneficiary of the AIG bailout was Goldman Sachs. In brief, Goldman made money underwriting mortgage investments that it sold to various pension funds. Goldman suspected that the investments were doomed, and leveraged a whole lot of money to make bets against the very investments it was underwriting and selling.

When the mortgage industry collapsed, Goldman won very very big. They were right to bet against the investment...

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