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.

And we continue with @merlyn-seller.bsky.social on bugsnax where we eat bugs. I never played this but it looks cute! Food also relates to body horror, value judgements (eg.?calory counting) and social boundaries related to transgression, power and even Otherness #digra25 #digra2025

Now up is a talk on food aesthetics in Genshin Impact and The Witcher by Benjamin Horn. Food can be related to survival, health, coziness and eco criticism (eg. Animal as food container/resource) #digra25 #digra2025

Back after lunch for a panel on games x food! A lovely topic that connects games with health. (Love this in relation to players too! I did a whole study on Portal’s cake a while back, published in Eating Fandom). First up a very interesting etnography of food in esports! #digra25 #digra2025

i wrote about the hunger games! the learning lessons from the hunger games as games, a government that likes to play games with its oppressed population, and katniss who doesn't play along and bends the rules💃🔥 now in the special edition of eludamos on fictional games: eludamos.org/index.php/el...

My first paper, "Fictional Videogames as Framing Devices: Suicide Communication in MMOs," is out now on Eludamos. In the paper, I argue that the use of fictional MMOs as framing devices serves as a reflexive narrative tool that suggests MMOs as spaces with their own internal rules of communication.

Save the date: July 18, 21h. Opening of the exhibition “Três Campos” (Three Fields), by Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais at Convento São Francisco, Coimbra, in the Dar a Ouvir 2025 programme. Three installations and an opening performance with @visiophone.bsky.social

How I take criticism.

een zorgwekkende zaak die dit verder goede artikel nogal terloops aanstipt: Defensie gebruikt esports om jonge gamers te werven maar plaatst geen leeftijdsrestricties op het Twitch-account, waardoor men haast automatisch ook kinderen van onder de 17 aanspreekt en dat mag niet

Are you a man, at least 15 years old and either Finnish or living in Finland? Do you participate in game culture by e.g. playing video games, RPGs or miniature games, watching videos or through activities like cosplay? Take the questionnaire in Finnish or English at bit.ly/pelikulttuuri

Among last week's sad news, nowadays aka everyday life, was the acquisition of Amsterdam University Press by Taylor & Francis. For me AUP used to such a role model with free quality monographs (one reason why I read many of their books) and this is here and now eve.gd/2025/06/08/w...

What does backgammon have to do with Playboy? This talk explores how 20th century media encoded masculinity, intimacy, and control through board games, tech, and leisure aesthetics. #GameStudies #MediaHistory #PlayboyArchive

New Mechademia issue out, edited by Jacqueline Berndt and all articles open access. Very nice to see out! Also, personally highly recommend the piece on web novels, publication industry + platform muse.jhu.edu/issue/53482

CfP: "Gotta Study ‘Em All: 30 Years of Pokémon!" The Pokémon franchise turns 30 years in 2026 🥳 To celebrate, we invite you to submit chapter proposals for an academic book prepared with Samuli Laato and Piotr Siuda. See the CfP: piotrsiuda.com/wp-content/u... Submission deadline: June 30, 2025.