Certainly feels like we are edging ever closer to John Brown territory.

Tune in today for @ckunzelman.bsky.social discussing material from his new book on Assassin's Creed, coming up in 20 short minutes on @romchip.bsky.social's Twitch channel.

📡 Signal blasting for new followers: I wanna do a lil intro abt ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories @romchip.bsky.social b/c we got an important fundraiser coming up in a few weeks. It's a free, open-access journal dedicated to game history, and if you love games, here's why you should care 🕹️🎲🀄🎯

That means: no institution pays our bills. We run on what we raise during our annual Twitch fundraiser, from donors like you Our fundraising season starts TMW with a free, public talk by @ckunzelman.bsky.social about his new book on Assassin's Creed. Tix and more info here: bit.ly/4t0NwKn

📢 THIS Friday Jan 23 @ 2pm ET 📢 🗡️📜🕹️ Cameron Kunzelman talks Assassin’s Creed, history, and how the franchise explores freedom, control, and conspiracy across time. 🗡️📜🕹️ 🎟️ TIX + Info: buff.ly/P2lVM1D 💸 Our talks are always FREE and PUBLIC. DONATE: buff.ly/QUhQANh

All the fans are wondering: is Yoshi's Island part of the Mushroom Kingdom, or a sovereign country? Perhaps it is more a protectorate, or a vassal state? And what the FANS aren't taking into CONSIDERATION is that Yoshi has a GUN, so it's WHATEVER the FUCK Yoshi wants it to be

this is Rowan signing off once again with "you can't understand the history of games without understanding how we physically interfaced with them"

Guys if you haven't watched it yet, this 4 part YouTube miniseries about how the first transatlantic telegraph line in the mid 19th century is like the tv show HOME IMPROVEMENT is one of the best things I watched in 2025 youtu.be/zmyBSrQodnI?...

The #ttrpg that's been at the top of my wish list for years is about to finally release, so I wanted to give a brief plug for "Stonetop" so other people who find it as exciting as I do can get in on what might be a limited print run. 1/

Deadball with my 5yr old today. Llewellyn Shark Stars v. Goose Hollow Hussars. When Puk Vulman singled with two outs to put runners on the corners in the bottom of the Fifth, my son pulls Justin Verlander for Wade Davis and gets the K to end the inning, preserve the tie. Future manager material!

Deadball with my 5yr old today. Llewellyn Shark Stars v. Goose Hollow Hussars. When Puk Vulman singled with two outs to put runners on the corners in the bottom of the Fifth, my son pulls Justin Verlander for Wade Davis and gets the K to end the inning, preserve the tie. Future manager material!

ME: yeah could i get the impossible burger with cheese. THE VIZIER WHO'S BEEN ADVISING ME: ahh, an excellent choice sire. an imitation of the genuine article. there are some "friends" of yours to whom it bears a passing similarity ME: you want anything VIZIER: [chuckles] what i want is of no import

Thank you all for your patience! Without further ado, it's This Year In Videogame Blogging 2025, complete with a bonus This Week In Videogame Blogging, December 28, 2025! critical-distance.com/2026/01/01/t...

What they also had was an unprecedented and unrepeated blank check budget owed to the Batmania drifting off Tim Burton’s movies. We’ll probably never see anything like it again. Read @dandock.bsky.social’s book next year, I AM THE NIGHT, for the full context of how this programming miracle happened.

New @romchip.bsky.social issue just dropped and it's a big one! Come for @lainenooney.bsky.social's epic interview with Leigh Alexander, stay for Hanae Kramer's dive into the Japanese hobby culture around "superguns". www.romchip.org/index.php/ro...

"People didn't put politics in their gaming in the old days". The year is 1969, a 25 year old Jim Dunnigan designs the wargame "Up Against the Wall, Motherf*****", a game about the student demonstrations at Columbia. One player plays the Administration and the other the Radicals.

I’ve known for a while that making time for reading makes me happier, so I’m getting back on track with Sara Ahmed’s *The Promise of Happiness* and I swear this was not intentional.

Analog counterpoint: “…far simpler paper simulations could achieve similar effects by fostering emotional experiences, indelible moments which prompted participants to internalize a worldview far more convincingly than any outside instruction could achieve.” reallifemag.com/command-and-...

The ‘crunch’ scenes on the bus would be incredible.

Day after Christmas, spending time listening to Flora Hibberd’s absolutely marvelous *Swirl* on the new turntable. Easily a top album of 2025. (Also, my kitchen is being remodeled and everything is jumbled, misplaced, and temporary, much like the placement of the record player and receiver)

If you’re reading this on Christmas morning, do me a favor and grab the family tv and throw the MAGES AND MURDERDADS video playlist up on there. Lotta visual gags for the whole family, and it’s like 150 hours long. m.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Kid Icarus is weird, it's all rough edges, it plays like it doesn't want you to get through it. All of that is the reason to play, though, not to avoid it. There's a good game in here if you can stomach failure, one that experimented and refused to be either approachable or just one thing.

Someone please photoshop this group of people into the scene in *The Money Pit* where Tom Hanks is trapped in a carpet stuck in a hole in the floor. That is the only appropriate image for these ‘architects of AI.’

Checking out the new Conway the Machine album today—also have the new Nas/DJ Premier album on queue as well. It’s been a fantastic year for hip-hop and while I’m loving these albums the best in the game, for me, is still Boldy James.

I’m at a children’s party. We are hunting for a unicorn to save it. The unicorn is actually a piñata. The children must now beat the unicorn with a stick to extract the candy within. Did I say this was a children’s party? This is actually an MBA course.

I went to PAX Unplugged and had about 5,000 conversations with fans, developers, salespeople, and more. I distilled the general experience into some predictions about what the world of tabletop is going to look like in the short term.

GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES ends the month pondering once more culture, media effects and violence, this time with a wildcard 2002 documentary that snapshots an era of which our own is a louder, coarser, echo: Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE rangedtouch.com/2025/11/30/8...

Darshana Jayemanne and my 2012 article "Game Studies Material Turn" from Westminster Papers In Communication just hit 200 citations on google scholar www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/1... #gamestudies

I talked to @ckunzelman.bsky.social about his Assassin’s Creed book, which turned into wide ranging conversation about how everything in entertainment is basically trying turn us into conspiracy theorists slate.com/culture/2025...

Gladius - really fun tactical gameplay with a Roman setting. Would love to see a remaster with more content added.

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner in August that investors are “overexcited” about AI models and that “someone” will lose a “phenomenal amount of money.” He means taxpayers, when the inevitable bailout occurs, not himself or other executives. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/g...

I still vividly remember watching a friend play this on PS2 and thinking, “damn, I must own this game.” I did not play games like DMC but it was so captivating, and the gameplay so fun, that I couldn’t resist buying it.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

It’s officially out!

Played my first game of Deadball with my 5 year-old son and his Shark Stars hit a walk-off 3-run home run (hello, Bobby Witt Jr.!) against my Zebra Mussels. We ran with just the basic rules this first go-around but it was a great first experience. Excited to play again!

Very proud to have worked on this statement of the Modern Language Association with @annamillsoer.bsky.social and other colleagues on the MLA’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching. It is a direct call for faculty input into Ed Tech decision-making, especially AI: www.mla.org/Resources/Ad... 🧵

Good morning. I don't know who did this, but I love you.

Hi friends! I am absolutely the worst at this myself but remember if we collectively decided we wanted to, I did create a #gamingthepast feed for BSky to aggregate. I'm trying to be better about that, because community is so important for history and games work. bsky.app/profile/gami...

Everyone interested in #gamingthepast. Did you know that www.playthepast.org still lives, 15 years after its launch and Gilles Roy is steering the ship to provide us with new thoughts and analysis on games and history? 1/

THE BANISHED VAULT is on SALE for 33% off. Buy it! Buy it for a friend! Help support development on future games. store.steampowered.com/app/2341070/...

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments. #medievalsky www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

WE ARE VERY CLOSE TO SELLING OUT THE FIRST PRINT RUN OF THIS BOOK! Please continue to buy it and send it around. It is available on all store fronts you might want to purchase it at!

Feeling nostalgic for Real Life mag today. They let play with ideas like the "Joker theory of the administrative state: Capitalists sow chaos, without any particular plan for the “new normal” other than the ability to continually reassert their own dominance" reallifemag.com/wrong-road/

This week on the blog: More Peasants! This week, we're modeling the full(ish) structure of women's labor in a pre-industrial peasant household, very roughly assessing the work required for textiles, farming, cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc. Now with pie chart! acoup.blog/2025/10/10/c...

I had a great time on Aftermath talking about how you can use Assassin’s Creed as a method of tracing the pathway to the world we live in.

I’d heard so much praise for this book and finally found time to read it. It’s a fascinating read that pushes us to reconsider the Eurocentric nature of Marxist accounts of production that often erase the history of medieval slavery.

Dolly rules and non parents probably won't know this, but she has a book club for little kids and she will just send them books for free. my kids have loved them. it's a good excuse to stop doing something and just hang out and read a book with them.

Stuart Hall took Thatcherism seriously & tried to understand its affective & aspirational appeal. Trumpism operates differently, as @cnewf.bsky.social notes, but the need to offer a cultural & political counter-strategy is key. I keep thinking about Hall’s adept use of new forms of media.

Umberto Eco once said, “the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.” @spice8rack.bsky.social’s video on Magic’s legally-distinct-from-Spider-Man set, Through the Omenpaths, shows how encoding these ‘fakes’ reveals their lack of depth youtu.be/LNGowvILFXo?...

Umberto Eco once said, “the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.” @spice8rack.bsky.social’s video on Magic’s legally-distinct-from-Spider-Man set, Through the Omenpaths, shows how encoding these ‘fakes’ reveals their lack of depth youtu.be/LNGowvILFXo?...