About

My name is Nathan Altice, and I live in Santa Cruz, CA where I teach game design, programming, and history in the Computational Media department at UCSC. My research covers the history of computing, games and play, sound synthesis, and a mixture of textual scholarship and media theory that I call the hardware humanities. On metopal (that’s here!), I mostly write about videogames and board games, with some occasional digressions. I have a portfolio and a page with some of my music and sound.

I wrote a book for MIT’s Platform Study series on the Nintendo Family Computer, aka the NES. That book, released in May 2015, is I AM ERROR. Buy it so I can get weirdly rich and lose touch with my humble roots.

This site began in late 2011, though it includes a few articles I imported from other sources. And it’s pronounced ‘meta-pull.’ You can reach me via Twitter (@circuitlions) or by combining my first initial and last name (no caps or spaces) at ucsc.edu.