inspired by this, I have done a free extract of this section of the book here. it is about understanding that *with all its problems* the BBC is as important for our intellectual health as the NHS is for our physical health: naomialderman.substack.com/p/the-bbc-an...

Research method textbooks in academia are a bit like email clients in software development: somehow, at some point in your career, everyone ends up being dissatisfied with everyone else’s and has to write their own which is 99% feature-identical to what’s already out there.

Come do your PhD with me at Imperial College in London! The LISS DTP funds 3.5y PhD tuition and stipend (+1y masters), deadline Jan 23: liss-dtp.ac.uk/applying-to-... See topics of interest below 👇

Mood.

With the 2025 @conference.aiandgames.com just around the corner, @tommy.aiandgames.com had something to get off his chest, or at least part of it. Game AI is facing an existential crisis, and we need to start talking about it. www.aiandgames.com/p/game-ais-e...

The meetings continue until morale improves.

2025: a late stage soviet bureaucrat larp you can never leave. Everything is strained and worn beyond function, everything breaks ever-faster, & the job is to make do & pretend & report numbers up & to the right, while everyone knows & copes & bonds over black humour & too much drink in private.

There is something truly remarkable about Generative AI. Several years in this revolution, half of the US GDP dumped to make these tools free, and i can't think of a single generated artifact, text, image, sound, video that had a significant cultural impact.

Feeling existential weariness today at so much academic effort promising to create AI systems and design frameworks that "augment rather than replace", support wellbeing sustainable just etc etc etc –– and yet, and yet, all it will achieve is Gutmenschen shelfware.

1. We ( @jbakcoleman.bsky.social, @cailinmeister.bsky.social, @jevinwest.bsky.social, and I) have a new preprint up on the arXiv. There we explore how social media companies and other online information technology firms are able to manipulate scientific research about the effects of their products.

This reads like what a reviewer 2 should have written, leading the handling editor to decide accordingly.

Imagine organisations took all the developer years they currently pour into AI assistants and used them to make their services more stable, accessible, performant, sustainable. The uplift in CSAT etc would be massive and long-term in comparison. The opportunity costs of AI are staggering.

Very pleased to see submissions to the special issue on Game Advertising of ACM Games: Research and Practice coming in. This is a last call! Deadline is 31 October 2025. We're looking forward to your submission, and if you need a smol extension… Slide into our emails. 😉 dl.acm.org/pb-assets/st...

on.ft.com/46M9mXI Why designers abandoned their dreams of changing the world. Free to Read.

In London, hate will never win.

Imperial opened its President’s PhD Scholarships (first deadline Nov 3): bit.ly/3JW2xuW Ping me to apply for a scholarship on: * Competence/empowerment/learning progress in games: models and DDA * The appeal of aleatoric uncertainty in games: models and tests ...

We’ll be hosting GachaCon 2026, a hybrid academic conference on gacha games with Genshin Impact as the theme, on 12–13 February 2026 at the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. 🇭🇰🇨🇳 Call for Papers: tinyurl.com/gachaconcfp

Great PhD/postdoc opportunity with a wonderful group: The Autotelic Interaction Group by @creativeendvs.bsky.social at Aalto has 1 PhD and 1 postdoc working on computational social intrinsic motivation – apply by Sep 30! www.aalto.fi/en/open-posi...

Annoyed by gross/sexist/AI/... slop in mobile game ads? Now is the time to write about it! Submit to @acmgames.bsky.social Special Issue on Game Advertising, submission deadline Oct 31. All details here: dl.acm.org/journal/game...

I find the delusion framing strange, which implies disordered perception. This is more innocent credulity of the mark of a conman? As in, the fault is in believing what the conman says, not in misperception or misconstrual.

Going back to 1969 to tell Foucault that in the future, everyone will know he was 100% right that "discourse” can produce itself without “a thinking … subject.” But also in the future we will care less about that principle than the practical consequence that students can cheat on homework.

“Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in "Send to YouTube" button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.” walzr.com/IMG_0001 this is beautiful 🥲

Want to work with the Smart Data Donation Service (sdruk.ukri.org/data/smart-data-donation-service/) on donated Google Play or YouTube data? UKRI has 6 fellowships for impact-driven research working with services like ours – do reach out! ukri.org/opportunity/smart-data-research-uk-fellowships/

📢The open access version of our book is available now via OUP's site: global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Who’s with me for a campaign to stop politicians wearing hi viz jackets and hard hats when talking about the economy and instead being filmed playing Total War: Warhammer

Your weekly UK HE equivalent of doomscrolling. A good sobering summary and assessment.

This is the first page I turn to when I’m showing people @molcher.bsky.social’s book about Judge Dredd and modern policing: shop.2000ad.com/catalogue/XB...

1. "'Trusting the experts is not a feature of either a science or democracy," Kennedy said." It's literally a vital feature of both science and of representative democracy. I've written a fair bit about trust in expertise as a vital mechanism in the collective epistemology of science.

Hey folks I am opening emergency commissions. My partners ebike was just stolen and they use it for work daily. I'll draw anything (Not hateful). My strengths are monsters, mice & maps. More examples below. Varied price points available. Please comment / message if you're interested.

Does cultural evolution generate more diverse and interesting work over time if fragmented into sparsely connected ecological niches? Eg, is cinema better for US/HK/JP/… cinemas having co-evolved with only sparse exchange over pre-globalisation decades?

🎓 PhD Studentship Alert 💰 Want to do a fully funded PhD in serious games? 🕹️ We have a studentship open at Imperial on using service design to create games for undergraduate science curricula. Apply by August 17, UK home students only. Full details 👉 bit.ly/games-phd-25 @ & DM open, pls share!

Enjoying SeGAH'25, the IEEE conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health, and decided to go for a spicy take as keynote: Why are serious games still stuck in promise land? speakerdeck.com/codingconduc...

On that note, the Royal Soxiety has opened Faraday Discovery Fellowships (up to £8m over 10y) to support intl senior academics to come to the UK: royalsociety.org/grants/farad...

We're growing! The Dyson School of Design Engineering ‪at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social ‬has 4 assistant/associate/full prof openings: * Behaviour in Design Engineering * AI for Humanity * Cyberphysical Systems * Design Engineering (wild 🃏) All positions here 👉 bit.ly/4lcAxQs

🎓 PhD Studentship Alert 💰 Want to do a fully funded PhD in serious games? 🕹️ We have a studentship open at Imperial on using service design to create games for undergraduate science curricula. Apply by August 17, UK home students only. Full details 👉 bit.ly/games-phd-25 @ & DM open, pls share!

I’m surely the 1,000th person to think of this, but: a copy-machine tax for AI scraping? Given the costs AI scrapers generate and the competitive use of generated v original material? Book publishers managed when xerox came around, infrastructure and precedent are there?

📯 New CFP out for an ACM Games Special Issue on Game Advertising – check it out ⬇️ and share!

📯 New CFP out for an ACM Games Special Issue on Game Advertising – check it out ⬇️ and share!

Every social computing system degrades toward spam. Exhibit A. Spotify drifting to AI generated slop listened to by fake bot listeners.

Interviews don’t track how individuals make sense. They track what discourse people pick up that appears to them to sensibly square socially legit responses, sometimes also their experience. And the words we use remould the memories we have.

Interactive Fantasy, the journal of interactive storytelling that I published in the mid-1990s, is no longer available from DriveThruRPG. However it is now available from itch.io instead: jameswallis.itch.io/interactive-... for the same low price of pay-what-you-want.

Creative AI/computational creativity folks: this paper and card deck by Xi Hu and colleague are ❤️‍🔥: Designing Interactions with Generative AI for Art and Creativity: A Systematic Review and Taxonomy kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/pu... genai4creativity.github.io/designing-ge... 👏👏👏👏 to the authors!

I happily blame @mtrc.bsky.social for adding Clues by Sam to my mandatory morning hygiene. cluesbysam.com

Sunday Digital Housekeeping: Installed NetNewsWire, parsed some RSS-free newsletters through Kill the Newsletter. Bluesky friends: Any recommendations for feeds, blogs, 'letters I should add to my RSS diet?

Super-happy to share that AVM Games: Research and Practice @acmgames.bsky.social joined PCI RR as a friendly and now accepts Registered Reports recommended by them. Do submit! 🤩

I think in media/HCI research, we don’t take substitutability seriously enough. “You can learn X from playing games.” True. But what is the superset of all activities people learn X from? Which works better for whom under what conditions?

Liquid, volatile, precariatized society means not just unmooring & responsibilizing individuals far beyond their agency: it also takes out the stable institutional structure from within orgs needed for them to maintain any organisational responsibility. Reorgs are the acid that dissolves all ethics.

When D&S researchers Ranjit Singh, @livgar.bsky.social‬, @briana-v.bsky.social‬, and @emnetspeaks.bsky.social‬ set out to interview people about their use of mental health chatbots, they encountered — and were fascinated by — a particular kind of AI-enabled deception. datasociety.net/points/chatb...

Satire is the undoing of AI.

If the Cosmic Dark Kickstarter reaches £63333, @jon.inkle.co of @inkle.co will write ALL MIND, a scenario about an alien language on an ancient spacecraft. Jon writes such creative narrative games. I'm excited. We're close to @symphonyhorror.bsky.social 's goal too. (Please share this!) #ttrpg