🚚🚚🚚New article alert! Part of a special issue on games + container technologies, it’s about truckers who play Truck Simulator in their trucks, but also simulation, battlestations, and the logistics of work and play. It's open access, so please take a look 🚚🚚🚚 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

✨Hello friends, I'm launching #EmergentGenders @dukepress.bsky.social next month in Busan 🇰🇷 hosted by @thekpopprof.bsky.social at Pusan National University, Global Studies Department 📅 Dec 9 (Tues) 🕰️ 10:30am (GMT+9) 📍 PNU CEIT #203 & Zoom 📧 [email protected] (for Zoom link)

For the past decade, I've been slowly cooking a small and humble book. Part (alternative) history, part analysis, and part social critique, this is a look at what games also are and have always been. ZEN AND SLOW GAMES Out 20/1/2026 by MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu/978026255356...

GREEN GAMING An educational innovation project in which 55 of my students researched ecogames and ecogamemaking. The result is a white paper that's meant to be accessible and useful for scholars, students, and the industry. tinyurl.com/greengamingtcm If you like it, please share it around!

November 19th, I'll take a (virtual) seat in Dr. Sebastian Möring's plan from Lublin to Helsinki. I'll be talking during the flight about my book on Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling, and about my experiences of having lived in Japan. Find the link to the stream below!

Now it is official! The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games is now, like, actually, surely, coming out! (This has been in the pipeline since 2018.) I have a piece here on this brand new thing called 'magic circle'. Everyone will be talking about it.

Following multiple requests, we are publicly extending the deadline for the ACM Games: Research and Practice Special Issue on Game Advertising by two weeks to Sunday, 16 November 2025. We look forward to your submission.

Mark Maletska (@ markmaletska.bsky.social) will give an Oasis Lunchtime Talk on "Why being a Ukrainian game studies scholar is… complicated?” on Thursday 23 October at 12:00-13:00 EEST. Join us at Oasis, Tampere University, or follow online: www.youtube.com/live/EBRRynA...

Since this article is making the rounds again, I guess this is a good moment as any to plug my book (despite me feeling super weird about self promotion), as I describe these dynamics in (some would argue) excruciating detail.

This weekend Cassandra Bookshop in Porto hosted the launch of the book Inteligências Entretecidas, which includes my essay “Imitation Aesthetics”. The book documents the workshop series organized by Earthsea Association and is edited by Ana Carvalho, Isabel Carvalho, and Vera Carmo.

Just now I discovered that with the acquisition of Amsterdam University Press (AUP) by Taylor & Francis (TF), the eBook version of my book is sold for €41,95 on their website with no OAPEN link available. I hope that this is just a mistake on TF's part and I just contacted them for clarification.

We‘d all like to make Rowling and her franchise disappear, but her transphobia & large-scale political influence and the reboot TV show make it hard to ignore from a scholarly perspective. Cassie Brummitt has written a salient study on what became of Harry Potter post-book that I got to blurb:

Bryan Hikari Hartzheim will give an Oasis Lunchtime Talk on “Institutions of Play: Mapping Japan’s Indie Game Scene" on Thursday 2 October at 12:00-13:00 EEST. Join us at Oasis, Tampere University, or follow online: www.youtube.com/live/IuTUH27...

I am very pleased to see this super insightful piece by @jingwangnyu.bsky.social out in @platformsnsociety.bsky.social! It examines how the “productization of APIs allows Alipay+ to extend its platform logic into global financial infrastructures. Read it here: doi.org/10.1177/2976...

Just adding some tags to this symposium announcement! #larp, #gamestudies, #analoggames, #trpg

The new issue of Countertext includes a paper by Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone and myself on libraries in digital games - their significances, (non-)functions, meanings. It's not open-access (boo), but ask and you shall receive www.euppublishing.com/toc/count/11/2

Meet me next week in Bochum (Germany) speaking about the concept of virtuality from the perspective of my own research, somewhere inbetween virtual prototyping and sensing.

Mijn nieuwste voor @mareonline.nl: www.mareonline.nl/opinie/waaro...

UK Gamescenes Symposium will take place in Tampere/Hybrid on 16th September. Program and details for joining are attached. 1/2 Features work from skypeeps @digdems.bsky.social @nitessine.bsky.social @merilainen.bsky.social @rosgakori.bsky.social @vkankainen.bsky.social

The programme for the East Asian Pop Culture workshop, documenting 30 years of transformation is now out. It features @tbaudinette.bsky.social as the keynote speaker this coming Sept @ NUS, Singapore. ari.nus.edu.sg/events/east-... #EastAsianPopCulture #FanStudies #AsianStudies

Jolly news: My new book with Jan-Noël Thon, "AI Aesthetics: AI-Generated Images between Artistics and Aisthetics", is now available as OPEN ACCESS with Routledge Focus. Check it all out: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edi... 🥳

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! @mahliann.bsky.social, @marcuscarter.com, and myself have combined our collective brains and written a wide-reaching introduction to the complex and interdisciplinary field of Game Studies in this forthcoming book for Polity. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

DiGRA 2026 will be hosted at Maynooth University in Maynooth, Ireland from 14 to 18 June 2026. The 2026 conference theme is Intersectional Pleasures. digra.org/digra-2026-h...

For my fellow colleagues working in the Dutch game sector and interested in game development & design, the Stimuleringsfonds has a call for funding proposals you might be interested in: www.stimuleringsfonds.nl/en/grants/op...

📚💻💰📝 If you are thinking about applying for an ERC grant and want inspiration, I've updated my paper where I tell how I got mine. It now includes the application (B1+B2), the manuscript for the presentation I gave at my interview, the slides, and the nine peer reviews. pure.au.dk/portal/en/pu...

New research: spending money on physical #CardPacks is also linked to problem gambling. 🎰 We answer an FAQ: enough about video game #LootBoxes; what about Pokémon / Magic: The Gathering cards? 🃏💳 We surveyed ≈2,000 card game players in English-speaking Western countries: doi.org/10.1037/adb0....

Issue 2 of the International Journal of Disney Studies is out! So many great articles on Animal Kingdom, Pixar‘s Luca and Turning Red, Daisy Duck and much more! #DisneyStudies @intellectbooks.bsky.social intellectdiscover.com/content/jour...

The book Challenging Contemporary Thinking on Play came out yesterday. Edited by Victoria de Rijke and Rebecca Sinker the book explores play through a series of interviews/conversations. I'm one of the people who participated. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Happy to let you know I'm one of the invited speakers to gachacon in February '26, organised at the CityU in Hong Kong. 🌸 This year's theme will be Genshin Impact. The event is free to attend, no registration fee!

Smart and delightful book, equally enjoyable @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social interview. @domford.bsky.social Mytholudics: Games and Myth @degruyterbrill.bsky.social #GameTheory#Folklore #Myth #PopularCulture newbooksnetwork.com/mytholudics

Recently, I was interviewed about my book for @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social by @janalena.bsky.social! If you want to hear me talk about games and myth for about an hour, please check it out. newbooksnetwork.com/mytholudics

back in may i went on a little quest in tokyo to visit some game-themed cafés and the result is now on @debuff.de! a little piece on why these themed spaces are special and fun but also an extension of commercial franchise logic: debuff.de/kuchen-komme...

Another new special issue, "Peripheral Religions" (edited by Carolin Puckhaber, Aska Mayer and Knut V. M. Wormstädt), in Gamevironments journal, at journals.suub.uni-bremen.de/index.php/ga...:

I now have a website! It's pretty bare-bones, but at least it rhymes! I'm hoping to get more stuff on there in the next month. Give it a look if you're so inclined - www.rainforestsb.me

Kreitzer and Sweet-Cushman have a great summary of the research here. I am not joking in the least when I say it's easier to detect instructor gender than teaching or learning in evals. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New paper!! Hermann Wigers and I used OpenAI to generate and analyse 11,800 stories "from" 236 countries: Norwegian stories, Chinese stories, American stories, etc. We found that GPT-4o-mini tells the same story over and over. open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-2...

I'm very happy to have a chapter in this beautiful collection! it's a critical examination of the academic politics of game studies in the Netherlands, and of which kinds of game/play research get uplifted or sidelined during the process of institutionalization in the neoliberal university:

New book "Histriographies of Game Studies" #OA punctumbooks.com/titles/histo... Lots of good stuff, I'm excited about this chapter: ping @poppywilde.bsky.social @doktornick.bsky.social

From Labubu to Hello Kitty swarovski, cuteness is hot! Why do we like cute characters and things? And what's up with this economy around kawaii bling? Let's zoom into the cute, the weird, the blind boxes and the consumption of it all! Hope you enjoy this new short read! 🌸❤️✨ #cuteness #toys

RE: the recent targeting of LGBTQ+ content on Steam and itch.io (see following tweet), our #OA article "Platform Produced Heteronormativity" outlines the restrictive self-regulation of platform-based gender and sexuality of adult videogames on #Patreon journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

CfP: Beyond Game Mechanics at City University of Hong Kong Dates: 8–9 October 2025 (offline participation only) [Extended] Submission Deadline: 31 July 2025 www.scm.cityu.edu.hk/events/beyon...

I spent 50 bucks on Pokémon Mezastar so you don’t have to. This is an arcade game that was released in Japan back in 2020 but was just released in other Asian territories earlier this year. It dawned on me in Singapore that this looks like a gacha game IRL. So how does it work? 🧵👇

I checked the corrected proofs this week and the book is off to the printer, so it's time for another reminder that MANGA'S FIRST CENTURY is available for preorder worldwide! ahorbinski.com/books/

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for. Stop using WeTransfer.

🫠 A thread from @rainforestsb.bsky.social and my recent presentation at #ludo2025 (ludomusicology conference) which examines how nu metal and early 2000s gaming culture contributed to the reinforcement of white male anger (1/20).

My paper on my piece A Structural Plan for Imitation: Engines of Differentiation has been published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X

I finished Date Everything! and have a hot take on how this portrays our relationships with objects.🔥From commodities to labor, this dating sim has a lot to say about things. How does this relate to gijinka and our fondness for things? Read more here. 👇 nicollelamerichs.com/2025/07/06/d...

“by calling LLMs ‘artificial intelligence’, we’re not just mischaracterising what these systems do; we’re also impoverishing our understanding of what human intelligence actually is. We’re essentially defining intelligence down to the narrow slice that current technology can simulate.”

Speaking next week at @imc-leeds.bsky.social about somatic activation as a concept for ideahistorical understandings of medieval arts and medievalist digital games, alongside some fantastic colleagues of IMAREAL Salzburg! If you are around, come by and share your favourite bloody medieval artworks!

Just finished my presentation at #digra2025. @nicolleness.bsky.social has excellently captured the essence of my talk as Love and Deepspace as part of larger trends of gamblification, women gaming, and otome games.