seeing people hit by the layoffs today who have worked in the industry for DECADES. one guy had worked on fucking STAR WARS GAMES FOR THE SNES, another had been at blizzard since starcraft. that kind of continual experience in the industry is like gold dust, and MS are just throwing it in the bin

OpenAI is using Studio Ghibli-style memes as an ad hoc promotional campaign for its new image generator—despite Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki's famous hatred of AI. Sam Altman made his X avatar a 'Ghiblified' portrait. Disgracing Miyazaki is part of the point: It's more proof to them tech has won.

Hi, are you working in the video game industry in a chiefly creative capacity (artist, writer, designer, etc)? Is your boss/company trying to foist AI on you against you or your team's wishes? If so I'd love to chat. lukeATaftermathDOTsite, or a DM here if you prefer, thanks!

I am in Adelaide for DiGRA Australia’s national conference the next three days! There probably won’t be any liveposting because no one really does that any more but here is the great program: digraa.org/post/digraa-...

Sad to see that the GDC State of the Games Industry '25 confirm what I have suspected for a while: narrative roles particularly hard-hit by layoffs in the industry. Narrative is sometimes seen as expendable on a project: when the reviews of our story come out, are we still on the team?

Writing a paper using ChatGPT is therefore a crime against (the author’s own) humanity

as LA is burning, a swath of the country is recovering from an ice storm, Alabama is preparing for up to 6” of snow and I’m praying for the TX power grid, a reminder: we don’t need climate action just for future generations, we need it now. the climate crisis is here, all around us

Occasional reminder that there’s no, “it’s too late, its over” for anthropogenic climate change. Every molecule of CO2 that doesn’t go into the atmosphere makes a difference. Preventing 0.1 degree of warming makes a difference. Every bit of climate resilience we build together makes a difference.

I have updated the Academic Workload Tracker for 2025. I strongly encourage all academics to track how long you actually work, and at what tasks. It's a crucial way to counter the deliberate wage-theft of obfuscatory university workload models. docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Know there’s been discourse about this article but it’s great to see this very real problem facing the game industry in a mainstream outlet: the industry’s silver bullet for always creating more consumer demand and higher profits simply doesn’t work anymore. web.archive.org/web/20241228...

Super important experimental study by @lcjacobs89.bsky.social and @jbpilet.bsky.social showing that mainstream parties signaling willingness to govern with radical right legitimize these parties with higher propensity to vote for radical right as a result journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

“ChatGPT is a woefully bad way to explore the historical record.” www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24... And much else.

I know we all realize this, but to underline the point: AI is predicated on exploitation, environmental degradation, and financial speculation. It should be the antithesis of everything we stand for as professors. Also, how the fuck are you going to ask your students to do their work if you won't?

Universities in Australia have undergone a seismic shift, moving from public institutions dedicated to knowledge and community to entities run increasingly as private businesses. Central to this change is the rise of the vice chancellor as a highly paid executive figure. www.afr.com/work-and-car...

Every dollar spent on exec salaries is a dollar drained from the labour of university workers and the quality of teaching and researching. Corporate parasites, the business world’s anti-intellectual proxy agents, that contribute nothing of value to the academy.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is the best novel I have ever read.

I feel like videogames actually do provide a pretty accurate representation of real life right now because a lot of videogames are like “THE WORLD IS ENDING” and then you just collect herbs and pretend nothing is wrong

It's really hard to overstate how many world-leading experts on digital media and social media are at Australian universities (I work with many of them!), and the overwhelming majority of them will tell you the social media ban is a bad and counterproductive idea.

We made a starter pack of researchers affiliated with the QUT Digital Media Research Centre