Ian Bogost is a philosopher, computationalist, and award-winning game designer.
His ten books include Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (with Nick Montfort), Alien Phenomenology, or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, and Play Anything: The Pleasure of Limits, the Uses of Boredom, and the Secret of Games.
Bogost is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, where he writes and edits on science, technology, design, and culture. He is also co-editor of the Platform Studies book series, about how the technical design of computing systems influences creativity, and the Object Lessons book and essay series, about the secret lives of ordinary things.
Bogost’s games about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, consumer debt, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, suburban errands, pandemic flu, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited or held in collections internationally, at venues including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Telfair Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, the Laboral Centro de Arte, and The Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
His independent games include Cow Clicker, a Facebook game send-up of Facebook games that was the subject of a Wired magazine feature, and A Slow Year, a collection of videogame poems for Atari VCS, Windows, and Mac, which was a finalist at the Independent Games Festival and won the Vanguard and Virtuoso awards at the IndieCade Festival.