buzzcut

Videogames — One Word or Two

Jun
08

As I mentioned, we completed the “Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual” and have the eBook version available.

In the next few days, I plan on posting up an in-depth FAQ on the International Game Journalists  Association site explaining  a lot of the rationale behind the guide and answer questons such as: “How can you dare to issue this style guide when it has errors in it?

But the big one i want to address is why we chose videogame as one word rather than two.

I’ll get to that rational on the IGJA site. For now, I’m curious–why should it be 2 words, like so many people seem to want?

The Buzz is Back

May
28

I know. A terrible way to reannounce the revival of my site.

But, hey, I’ve been waiting for brilliance to strike for a year. And I guess at this point I’m just going to have to accept that I’m not that clever.

Anyway, a couple of bookkeeping items:

  • The old buzzcut site has been extensively archived and rolled up. You can find most anything that was once here moved over to: www.buzzcut.com/archive. Please keep in mind that most of the functionality was turned off in the process of creating the archive. But all of the content should be available.
  • Where have I been? For the past two years I have been working on a PhD in planning and design in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado. I’ve managed to hang onto my videogame research orientation in the guise of studying virtual spaces and leisure places. This summer I am co-teaching a course called, “Visualizing the Virtual” that looks at the whole idea of environmental design (architecture and such) in the digital domain.
  • I’ve also put a significant amount of time into the Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual. This book mirrors the AP Stylebook and should provide an indispensable resource for game journalists and researchers. But I think it’s a fairly thought provoking tome for anyone interested in games. Visit the Style Guide site and request a copy of the ebook. If you say that you read about it on buzzcut, we’ll send it to you for free.
  • What’s the future of buzzcut.com? Well, as the game studies area has grown, developed and otherwise bloated, I’ve found a certain need to focus my research interests. As I mentioned, I’m in pretty deep in terms fo architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. So, I expect to move buzzcut a little more in the direction of my research interests. For better or worse, buzzcut as “critical videogame theory” will probably end up being more buzzcut “understanding videogames as space” (or maybe that should be “videogames in spaaaaaaaace!).
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