This is delightful!

Damn, someone really should write a book about how gamification is often very bad!

This was really pretty good! Great thread discussing it here in terms of immersive entertainment.

Ticket acquired - see you at the Nordic Larp conference in Gothenburg!

Palestinian larp needs our help. During the last 15 years, a vibrant larp culture has grown in Palestine, together with the Palestinian larp organization Bait Byout. Israeli repression affects all areas of Palestinian larp, including larp. Donate if you can birthoflarp.wordpress.com/support-larp...

About 40% through The Rose Field, the final instalment to Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust, and I can't bring myself to go any further. Not because it's bad – I'm enjoying it! – but because I'm not quite ready for this story to be finally done.

The New Yorker keeps switching between AI and human narrators for its audio articles – it's striking how much more comfortable and comprehensible the humans are. AI narrators are useful when there's no alternative, but these pieces must get tens of thousands of listeners... just pay for a human!

This is cool – but $699?!? It's discounted to $499 for now, but that is a *lot* of money.

Immersive experience where you compete to do real world transactional stuff as fast as possible - airport security, ordering at fast food kiosk, supermarket self-checkout

Day 2 thread of my coverage of the Immersive Experience Network Summit in London! Check out Day 1 below... Adrian Cohen: Big screen Cosm venues are about providing social immersive experience without VR headsets, i.e. feeling of being together in a stadium together.

Even "good immigrants" are cast aside by the UK's xenophobic policies. Once again this country can't even clear the lowest-ever bar of its post-imperial responsibilities. Archive: archive.is/VtFMc

There is a lot of talk here (by me) about organising a Jubensha convention in the UK next year, just saying…

Here's my ongoing thread about the Immersive Experience Network Summit in London, happening today and tomorrow! Feel free to mute if you aren't into this stuff but it's a good crowd and people are pretty open about their opinions and experience... 🧵

If you like interactive fiction and games like Kentucky Route Zero, you owe it to yourself to check this out. Just caught a preview and loved it!

By an amazing coincidence, the same day I start playing BallxPit, I saw a LinkedIn post from a games industry person saying “hey guys maybe it’s not great that so many games are using gambling mechanics these days?”

Went to my first BAFTA screening in a long time, for Nouvelle Vague. I liked it a lot! It probably helped that the audience, pretty much all of whom work in the film industry, laughed and groaned in sympathy. There’s a very different vibe when people are watching a film because they care.

I am finally going to see ABBA Voyage in January for Research! I need your advice – which tickets should I get? Are the more expensive ones at all worth it? /cc @naomialderman.bsky.social @thacher.bsky.social

Just tried ZU-UK’s Within Touching Distance VR experience, which involves a live performer mirroring a virtual person’s touch. I’ve read a lot about how their work over the decades has focused on caring and touch so it was great to try it out in person. Interesting!

All networking events need at least one designated host who goes around looking for people on their own and introduces them to others with similar interests. This takes maybe a couple of minutes per person and is pretty fun and easy if you know what you’re doing!

Quite the trip to read about The Mars Society’s conference this year. I was at the first one in Colorado in 1998 after winning an essay competition about why humans should go to Mars when I was 15. A few years later, I was a crewmember in one of the first mission simulations in the Utah desert…

I’m going and you should go too!

a lot of people don’t realise the new willennium began in 2001, not 2000

Fascinated how friendslop games recapitulate real world hobbies that provide challenge and connection, even as we're newly surprised that real world hobbies can do the same

Truly awful ep of This American Life this week: Evan Ratliff gets his "AI clone" to call up friends and family for Content and later says, “huh I had no idea this would have been so annoying and disturbing to people," as if such a realisation would have been impossible beforehand

don't threaten me with a good time

I feel like the Guardian put these two stories together on purpose

me getting interrupted during meditation for Buddhism Double XP Power Hour

"Cosplaying" and "larping" are real activities done by real people, and using these terms as slang for "pretending to be someone you're not, for political purposes" does indeed alienate those of us who take part in these activities.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Laura Kröger about Odysseus, one of the most ambitious and technically advanced larps ever made. Odysseus only ran three times in 2024 because it was entirely volunteer-powered. Afterwards, they debated turning it into a permanent space with paid roles. And now...

There's interesting links here both to early 20th century Futurism, but the valorisation of agency also reminds me of how immersive experiences promise to restore audiences' lost agency

I just signed up for The Smoke larp festival in London! Running from 9-11 January, tickets are £90 for the whole thing. I highly recommend it if you want to try out Nordic-style larp for the first time in a fun and friendly crowd!

DEI officers £2 Woke stuff £1 Essential services £100,000,000 Parks £2 someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this

There's a common belief that we're getting better at spotting AI writing but I was astonished by how many commenters thought this review *wasn't* written/edited by AI. Everything about it screams AI! The headings! The phrasing! Sentences like this: "It’s subtle, silent, and personal."

I'm not so sure that there's a resurgence of small, casual talks/events. If there is, it's only because they're starting from such a low floor. Back in the in the 2000s and 2010s I feel like there were "science in the pub" events all over the UK.

Really appreciated @bryancurtis.bsky.social and @joelanderson.bsky.social's journalism-centric take on the Ezra/Coates discussion!

Brilliant writeup of a fascinating larp!

The funniest thing about a BritCard digital ID is that the dumb idea that all immigrants get free iPhones will finally become real

It would be almost impossible to launch a game like Zombies, Run! today – we'd be crowded out of the App Store charts, and being featured provides far fewer downloads than before. We were fortunate in launching during the time when people were willing to try out new things – and pay for them!

Wild shit at Berlin airport. Check in systems are down which means that when you board, they don’t scan your boarding pass. Instead someone reads your name and seat number over a speakerphone to someone else who types it into a computer and says yes or no. It’s just like BSG!

I feel like if you’re going to take over a major section of a city centre for a private event (eg Berlin Marathon) you should probably make sure that the pedestrian crossing points marked on the official map are actually operational

I was recently talking to someone who spends a lot of time teaching, and he kept doing this annoying thing where he’d ask me an open question: “why do you think X is this way?” I’d give a whole general answer and then he’d say “but don’t you think it’s actually A, B and C?”

I'm giving a talk on writing better dialogue tonight! It's at 10.30pm BST, to the HealthyGamerGG community: members.healthygamer.gg/c/community-... Come along to see how coherent I can be after being woken at 4.30am to drive a toddler round in pursuit of a nap.

Wish I could go to this – but that means you can go instead!

Listening to Ezra Klein's latest, it's clear he feels he has a lot in common with Kirk as a political commentator, so the only thing he is able to say now is "I don't think there should be political violence" because he is personally terrified

Apparently The Wizard of Oz (Sphere's Version) is making $2m/day and could gross up to a billion during its entire run. The venue also gets to keep more of the gross versus sharing it with bands. But the real lesson here is that making hyper-bespoke content for a single venue is awful business.

Fascinating to see Minecrafters reinventing how to roleplay in this 1000 player social experiment/movie. Definite crossover with RP servers and larp! Yet there's also a blurring of the lines between players' real identities and in-game characters, which is bound to cause tears (via Simon Carless)

Punchdrunk’s new immersive video game-like show has been delayed a couple of months to November… 👀

I'm running a panel on larp with some absolute superstars of the field at next month's Immersive Experience Network summit! @mikepohjola.bsky.social of Turku Manifesto fame! Laura Kröger of the epic sci-fi blockbuster Odysseus! @rebelrehbinder.bsky.social of UK larp makes Omen Star!

Holy shit, it’s Death on the Nile meets Return of the Obra Dinn: The Larp deathanddenial.nl

As ever, @jonathanliew.bsky.social is the best writer at The Guardian