This page is the electronic equivalent of a scrapbook – press clippings, web interviews, and other professional memorabilia.

It seems a bit self-involved, I know, but I want to keep track of this stuff somewhere, and this seems like as good a place as any. The main titles are links to the websites where the material originally appeared. I have also kept  copies of everything on this website. If a link is broken, try the local copy.

Note to copyright holders: This material is provided for informational, non-commercial purposes. If you hold the rights to any item here and object to its publication, please contact me and I will remove it immediately.

Game Design and Development

Questions for Ernest Adams, author of Dogma 2001, a Video Game Manifesto
[ local copy ]
April 15, 2001

This article ran in the New York Times Sunday Magazine following the publication of Dogma 2001. Being published in the mainstream press, it got a great deal of attention.

Game Programming Italia Interview (in Italian!)
[ local copy, in English ]
March 26, 2005

A short interview with an Italian game developers' website. It was the first I had ever heard of. As I can't read Italian, I have no idea whether the translation is good, but my interviewer used pretty good English in talking to me, so it probably is. First time I've ever been asked about Richard Wagner (the composer, not the actor) and his theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total artwork").

AdventureGamers.com Interview
[ local copy ]
December 30, 2003

A fairly in-depth interview about the nature and future of adventure games, conducted at the 2003 Level Up conference of the Digital Games Research Association in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The essence of it is that I believe adventure games will continue to stay around, but not necessarily in the form that we know from the old LucasArts days.

Madden Central
[ local copy ]
April 21, 1998

This is an interview about my work on Madden NFL Football that appeared on Madden Central, one of the best of the Madden fan sites.

Creation of a Game
[ local copy ]
1998

This is a short interview about the game design process that appears on the GameDev.Net website.

Gaming and Society

Avós e netos lutarão por um lugar no 'top 10' em 2050
(Grandparents and grandchildren compete for the "top 10" in 2050)
[ local copy ]
November 19, 2008

This interview, in Portuguese, was published in Expresso, the largest weekly Portuguese magazine. It's mostly about the changing demographics of gamers.

Eboredom.com Interview with Ernest Adams
[covers a wide variety of subjects]
 

Mit Spielen viel am Hut ["A hat full of games", a German idiom meaning "thinking about" ]
[ local copy ]
December 1, 2002

This article appeared in the Sonntags Zeitung (Sunday News), a Swiss newspaper. It's in German. I don't have a translation of it, but as far as I can tell it's generally complimentary ! It begins, "The 42-year-old American Ernest W. Adams is the social conscience of the game designer."

Computer Games a Form of Art: Designer
[ local copy ]
June 28, 2004

While I was in New Zealand for their first-ever game developers' conference, I was interviewed by the Otago Daily Times ("the voice of the south"). Otago is a region on the South Island that includes Dunedin, the town where the conference was held. This article was the result. They were also kind enough to refer to me as a "games visionary" on the front page!

Interview with Ernest Adams
[about technology, games and the digital divide]
[ local copy ]
November 21, 2000

This interview appeared on the website of an organization called Digital Opportunity Coalition Chicago (or "docChicago" for short). Their goal is to help close the digital divide in Chicago's neglected and disconnected communities.

Columbine and Computer Games and Sex and Violence:
An Interview with Game Designer Ernest Adams
January, 2000

This appeared on a website devoted to Game Deputy, a product that allowed parents to control their children's use of computer games. It appears to be defunct.

Digital Divide: Gender Voices
[ local copy ]
January 28, 2000

Digital Divide was a two-part television documentary on the social divisions caused when some people have access to computers and others don't. I was interviewed for the segment on games for girls. It aired on PBS at different times in the spring of 2000.

Miscellaneous Articles

Collins College Commencement Address
March, 2005

Collins College, in Tempe, Arizona, invited me to deliver the commencement address at their spring graduation ceremony. They requested that I limit it to 10 minutes, and that I provide a few jobhunting tips in the speech. As a result, it reads rather oddly -- half prosaic advice, half inspirational pep-talk.

Hackers in Paradise
Rolling Stone, issue #367, April 15, 1982

This is a fairly long article about me and a number of my friends, back when we were undergraduates at the Stanford Low-Overhead Timesharing System (LOTS). It documents a peculiar phenomenon that persists to this day, although in a different form: hacking. This is hacking in the original meaning of the word: compulsive programming caused by the addictive power of a creative medium, the computer itself. (True hacking has nothing to do with breaking into other people's computers.)

The article was written at a time when the Internet was still the Arpanet; personal computers were rare, expensive, and feeble; and mainframes were the most powerful and preferred means of computing. It was written by Steven Levy, who subsequently wrote the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.