Walked past a bunch of film students on their way to a lecture, and thought it was cute how many of them were wearing movie t shirts. Dune, Jaws, etc. Chuckled to myself and then realised I'm wearing my "Escape the Dark Sector" board game shirt on the way to my teaching...

CÖRK BØRD is "a MÖRK BORG compatible game of police procedural horror". (I don't know much about it, but what a name!) www.kickstarter.com/projects/all...

Next Thursday (September 11th), join @florencesn.bsky.social & myself in discussing #game archaeology and speculative #fiction in relation to my latest novel! The presentation starts at 6 PM at Village Bookstore in Leeds (UK): >> villagebooks.co/blogs/blog/w... <<

Age caught up with me and I've joined glasses gang. I wasn't prepared for the weird pageantry vibes of the opticians. Like a medical coronation.

york folks, i'm starting to run weekly workshops about alternative, low-tech digital tools. running the first, trial session monday next week. come by, play and make a zine!! sign-up here: www.eventbrite.com/e/make-and-b...

bloody eck

The compulsory scam-awareness training uses as an example phishing email of "You are getting a raise", and assures me that my employers would never ever send me such an email.

This week at fractals.coop we’re launching our new service: Games for research, engagement, and impact. Want to turn your research into an engaging and impactful experience? We bring games design, play and immersion. You bring the research. fractals.coop/blog/games-f...

Me, Caleb, and @kierancutting.bsky.social have been working to evolve Meal Deal from research through design artefact to a something we might sell. Find Caleb and enjoy the latest(ish) version! Sadly kieran and I can’t be there this year. Og version is here: oliverbates.itch.io/meal-deal

I feel like you could replace "AI coding tools" with a lot of things and the graph would look the same - "Refactoring Codebase", "Using new Javascript framework", "Switching IDE to Dark Mode", "Making your own Mechanical Keyboard"

Great news from a kickstarter project that's collecting fart noises

Played Thousand Year Old Vampire and was killed in a sunlight-related incident at age 34 ⚰️

Agree with Joe, great to see so many people responding. alt.chi was the heart of culture at CHI and the conference is diminished now.

"Jessica... what fucking size shoe do you have?!" - best line from the horror film Clown in a Cornfield (2025)

Been playing Star Trek: Captain's Chair #boardgame a bunch and really enjoy it. Kind of amazed it exists - rare to see a licenced game so heavy and intricate. Full of deep cut references, but also deeply thematic and joyful in play. Defo not for the faint of heart (rules + play >= 3hrs)

a fun growing collection of creative and weird drum machines for your browser: 10kdrummachines.com (via @b3ta.com )

The countdown for the open call is real. We will close the applications for our 1500 EUR grant on 24th of May! Wanna make a short artsy game about CHEESE and get sweet cheese for it? You got three days left! Share, repost, AND APPLY! #indiedev #gamedev www.goldextra.com/en/briefs-20...

Fun tour of the emerging irreverent voice in UK games magazines in the 80s from Robin Bootes at #BDiGRA25 . Tag urself im a wally/gremlin

Some links from our lightning talk: - Tea Towels, Meal Deal and design outputs: crankandfile.co.uk, - Screw That: oliverbates.itch.io/screw-that, - Our Zine: oliverbates.itch.io/rtgd,

A Zine for #BDiGRA25 by me and @ben.kirman.org about what making games in our research can look and feel like, and us wondering about ways to talk about our research games without measuring and evaluating. I have physical copies and games on my person! oliverbates.itch.io/rtgd

Great to hear from Prasad on his great applied game work at #BDiGRA25 good to see some @iggi-phd.bsky.social folks here!

I was recommended the "ALL THE PROBLEMS IN THIS WORLD" store in Berlin. A really special place filled with a treasure of zines, games, cassette tapes, art books and graphic novels. If I was travelling with a larger bag I could fill it. alltheproblemsinthisworld.com

One of the first things I saw at A MAZE was a performance featuring an Axolotl and Godzilla singing about the health benefits of coconut water, followed by a scene featuring two xenomorphs having sex, so it has set a good benchmark.

I am at #AMAZE2025 (@amazefest.bsky.social) in Berlin this week, then at #BDiGRA2025 in Birmingham next week. Please say hello and show me weird games. As described in recent student feedback I am "surprisingly chill".

Fortune has now picked up on the story of Coca-Cola using AI to make an ad campaign that mistakes my book and translation for The Real Thing fortune.com/2025/05/14/a...

YOU ARE INVITED to come to the next iGGi Conference!!! 🏵️ iGGi CON 2025 🏵️ 🍃 10+11 September, York 🌱 REGISTRATION NOW OPEN! 🌱 Register via our website: 🟩 iggi2025.org 🟩 @york.ac.uk @cs-uoy-research.bsky.social @qmuleecs.bsky.social @qmul-dc.bsky.social #games #gamedev #research #PhD #conference

Colleagues of mine are seeking to commission a graphic novel that captures their research project's findings. Commission value £24,000, application deadline 7th May To apply: Send CV and portfolio to [email protected] Further details here: www.linkedin.com/posts/nuri-k...

Dog biscuit 3d printer www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHiX... www.printables.com/model/123961... Step 7: "Load the gravy into the syringe."

"SCREW THAT!" a free mini game to play at home, about dealing with infrastructure breakdown, from @oliverbates.co.uk oliverbates.itch.io/screw-that

Coolest thing I've seen at Salute today: this minis version of the classic early-80s Atari arcade game Battlezone. Not the digital-to-tabletop adaptation I'd expected to find, but wow.

Quite enjoyed watching "From" which is one of those spookyweirdwoooo shows, but with a bit less bullshit about there being a clever hidden logic to the mystery, instead it just leans into being wildly inconsistent and fucking with one character specifically.

A pity we didn't get the explicitly antifa version into the mix to inoculate that AI against its own worst impulses

A whole ton of my journal papers & books are in the LibGen database, and have been nicked by Meta/Facebook to train its AI Consoling myself with the fact that our paper on the future enslavement of humans by AI is in there too @ben.kirman.org @shaunlawson.bsky.social @conorlinehan.bsky.social

This week I defended my PhD - “Imagining Otherwise. A Speculative Feminist Design Approach to Interspecies Kinship - a reflective account of other ways of knowing, thinking and being with and in the world.” At @imaginationlanc.bsky.social

Plumber: "Do you like working from home?" Me: "Yeah when I can, I get a lot done..." *awkward silence* Me: "...you would need... to grow your arms really long..." *he stops, looks at me* "What do you mean?"

Mini game design fictions, great idea. Immediately like the sharp concept of this one from @bullypulpithq.bsky.social : itch.io/jam/imaginar...

my first paper, which I co-authored with @jaakkostenros.bsky.social and @sotamaa.bsky.social, is now published!! it is essentially an invitation, and a tool, to reflect on and experiment with the rules we play by to invent personal metagames and shape agencies. open access dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Really worth reading this article, it's great. www.pcgamer.com/games/advent...

One for the collection. This illustration of a "Direct Drive Extruder" on Wikipedia - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fused_f...

Love this. The models they make are amazing but this is the first one where I've thought it is within my skill and humour to replicate.

Steam: "flesh might be the most thought-provoking currency we have" store.steampowered.com/bundle/24095...

2.17: Extremely Miniature Golf

This is fantastic, and also check out the thread for examples people have added. Our own game about being a football supporter definitely fits here too (ben.kirman.org/projects/non...)

Added some details about the BRANNEN interactive theatre/mobile game project with Teatret Vårt in Molde and Ålesund, Norway. Another fantastic project with great collaborators. ben.kirman.org/projects/bra...

Metro designer is such a clever tool for all 3 of you interested in designing metro maps. Find it here: tennessine.co.uk/metro/

Wrote up some technical details of the Utopia Concreta project, that I worked on in Portugal last year. There's a lot more detail but it was a cool and fun mix of complex technologies for an interactive, gamelike, outdoor audio-walk/live theatre experience: ben.kirman.org/projects/uto...

Played some Ouija Manor this week (boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/43...). A ghost communicates through a mini ouija board, and by possessing other players' figures to point at clues in this cleverly engineered cardboard house. #boardgames

Shout out to the B&Q employee in the tiling section who overheard me explaining to my child the semiotics of this mimetic nightmare, and didn't call the police. www.diy.com/departments/...