Ian Bogost is one of my favorite writers/theorists/makers on games, and we’ve had some group conversations over email along with several people in the games network in Denver and elsewhere. He was in Denver earlier this year and came to give a talk to the Colorado Game Developers Association meeting. The email conversations are often started by Devin Monnens (a fellow eMAD student) and we usually get some interesting back and forth discussion from them. I recently found that a couple of these conversations made Water Cooler Games, Ian and Gonzalo Frasca’s game-related blog. First, a reaction to a game used to test the racial bias of Denver Police Department officers. Second, a comment I made about the similarity of disaster attacks you can invoke in SimCity to real-life terrorist disasters.

Ian’s new book, Persuasive Games, is partly a discussion of the rhetorical qualities of the games (and their rule systems).

Finally, he’s the only game designer that I know of (besides Will Wright) to have appeared as a guest on Colbert Report (video here).