This is this week! Come to Stoke Newington & join us for a chat about videogame cities & a wander round some virtual Hong Kongs

I like this as an explanation of why so much of the Kirk coverage has been so maladroit: that the things pundits struggled to understand about memes a decade ago increasingly apply to acts of political violence

Lovely game this - unabashedly twee & soppy without being vapid or cloying, builds neat scavenger hunt mechanics around what would normally be clipping & collision errors & uses them to pose some surprisingly chewy questions about grief, memory, museology

neighbour on the street Whatsapp has a bag of homegrown watercress to give away & now I keep cracking myself up remembering how much of the 12th century epic of mad king Sweeney consists of him ardently pining for same

✨ call for proposals ✨ - "Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital", London 23-26th June 2026 - coinciding with 25th anniversary of @kingsdh.bsky.social. deadline: 30th September 2025. further details here: jonathangray.org/2025/09/11/d...

Londoners, I'll be talking to Aidan Page about his work on virtual renditions of Hong Kong for the UK leg of the Hong Kong Film Festival at @loading.bar in September www.hkff.uk/full-program...

I am excited to announce the Games for Palestine charity bundle page is now live!!! Over 300+ games with proceeds going to UNRWA USA in support of Gaza relief. Thank you to everyone for your support. The bundle launches on Sept 2nd 9am PST. Link: itch.io/b/2979/play-...

My new book has a cover! Much gratitude to Tabitha Nikolai for letting me use a shot from her peerless dysphoric suburban hikikomori simulator Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court 🙏

My copy of this arrived! Shout to editors @profmatthew.bsky.social & Steffi Shook, & drop me a line if you'd like to read my chapter on how videogames model & represent sexual reproduction, heredity & evolution...

💗

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

i) the fit but ii) the festival website suggests Peter is sharing a bill with Dominic Cummings & a Hungarian reggae/dancehall/hip-hop/funk/rock act called Irie Maffia

My amazing department at King's College London is organising a BIG conference on 'THE DIGITAL' In 2026. Do come! Call for papers: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/digit...

UK scholars 👇

This! Everything coming out about Collective Shout makes it clear they're cynically prospecting for the likeliest fissures to jam wedges into

my #DiGRA Writing Gameplay workshop is at 2:30 Malta time! Come thru if u want to read snippets of autofiction, philosophy, fanfic & phenomenology about Fifa, the Sims, Smash, Yakuza 0 & hunt the slipper. Info below - drop me a line & I can share the texts digraconference2025.org/calls-worksh...

WOKE?! Come to our panel on Digital Futures of Diversity on 23 June at King's College London as part of @kings-dfi.bsky.social 'Living Well with Technology' series, with @birgitneunews.bsky.social , @lewisiwu.bsky.social, & @nessakeddo.bsky.social and Elisabeth Kelan. www.kcl.ac.uk/events/digit...

🚨 BREAKING 🚨 We're pleased to reveal the lineup poster for Games Transformed 2025! We’ll be joined by Meg Jayanth, Chris Bratt, Gareth Damian Martin, Clapton CFC, Innuendo Studios & many more! Join us on Saturday 12 July for Games Transformed 2025. TICKETS: www.tickettailor.com/events/games...

the trilogy gets more airtime, but I read these last year & thought Forgetting Elena was particularly great - arch & cryptic, lots of rich textures & cattily fraught interpersonal dynamics & pageantry. RIP!

May's Field Work NTS show is up - squelchily sultry cuts from Studio & the Womacks, some late-model Sleazy Christopherson in synth-choral mode, a sliver of vintage Insides ~~ & more~~ www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...

Worth reading! Especially given all the excruciatingly asinine punditry rn re: Reform's bid to outflank Labour on welfare!

📚 Join us at King’s College London on 21 May for the launch of Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, a book by @disconetwork.bsky.social exploring the possibilities that technoskepticism can create. 📍 Strand Campus and online, 17:30 🔗 Sign up: www.kcl.ac.uk/events/techn...

The work that @afterclimate.com.au is doing with Greening the Games Industry project is one of the best and most important areas of work I'm seeing in games and I heartily recommend subscribing to the extremely excellent and informative newsletter that Ben sends out. gtg.benabraham.net

There are a couple of weeks left to register & suggest texts for my #DiGRA 2025 workshop on writing gameplay (full details here: buff.ly/Ifv7R97), so here's a thread of snippets I like from texts wholly or in part about where, how, why & with whom people play games...

lots of talk about young ppl, digital media & harm right now, not unjustifiably - but this is (among many other things) a really evocative account of gaming as reprieve from the banal normative violence of home and school c. the turn of the millennium

Master's scholarship at King's College London for Black, Asian and minority home students! My faculty (Arts & Humanities) is offering three postgraduate taught programmes scholarships (fees) - closing day is 14 May. Details here: www.kcl.ac.uk/study-legacy...

I'm running a workshop on Writing Gameplay at DiGRA 2025! Idea is to talk through the forms and functions writing about gameplay assumes in game studies research and teaching, & to read some short texts together - full details & sign-up info at digraconference2025.org/calls-worksh... #digra2025

Details and calls for all eighteen DiGRA 2025 workshops are up on the website! digraconference2025.org/calls-worksh...

was cool to be part of such a great panel, as much as I wish some of our comments re: tech oligarchic dreams of post-democratic futures sounded a little more fanciful 3 months down the line

liked this a lot - partly the Araki via Gustave Moreau via that PS1 Hokuto no Ken game aesthetic, but also its using the idiom of Silent Hill & Persona to tell a story that's not just about queer characters, but about the desire for continuity/change, sovereignty/subjection, sameness/difference

In an era when gaming literacy is fundamental to understanding popular culture and technological power, 'Ready Reader One' examines the role of videogame literature in explaining not only how we play videogames, but the stories we tell with, about, and around them. lsupress.org/978080718089...

TW18

Call for book chapters!📖 I'm co-editing a book (w/ @agatawaszkiewicz.bsky.social) on ✨COZY MEDIA✨ with Amsterdam Uni Press. Please see details and deadlines on our shiny new website: cozymedia.net/call-for-pap... Abstracts due 31 March💐 Full chapter due 31 July🌞

the fact that Elon insists on adding a glaze of decade-old internet gags & fads shouldn't make the rank depravity any harder to stomach, but speaking as an elder millennial digital cultures scholar I have to confess that it somehow does

😢 www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6dy...

DID YOU KNOW that the founder of 8chan got his first taste of anon culture when 4chan raided Sonic Adventure 2's Chao Kindergarten BBS, a place for swapping tips on breeding, raising & racing rare variants of adorably vacant, droplet-headed virtual pets?

Just incredible levels of inopportunity here...

Here's a very long, very interesting report on "the fuck happened to the games industry over the past few years" that is worth a look. Lots of graphs and data points for the sickos out there. www.matthewball.co/all/stateofv...

Some good people are putting together a special issue on videogame theory at Media Theory Journal. CFP: mediatheoryjournal.org/cfp-videogam... #gamestudies

maiden Field Work mix of 2025 is up to salve those early January/late modernity blues. Some frosty drones & esoterick canticula, plus a breezily limber Letta Mbulu number www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...

finding the elision of the metaphysical, moral & biomedical bothersome here. Pick an épistémè already, bigots

new credo just dropped

Call for Papers: ‘Reactionary politics, women, and popular culture’, a one-day symposium at Loughborough University

I've got a piece in here on gamer memoirs (also everyone should read Dennis Cooper's God Jr., especially if you need something to wash away the nauseously cloying aftertaste of Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow or the rank glucuronolactonic tang of Ready Player One)

Dr Hye-Kyung Lee (@kingsartshums.bsky.social) will be discussing creative precarity in the time of generative AI at 2pm today, Wednesday 11 December. There's still time to register to attend, either in-person (Bush House, @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social) or online ⬇️ www.kcl.ac.uk/events/creat...

last Field Work show of 2024 is on the NTS site. A yuletide trip to the saloon via music from Áine O'Dwyer, John Martyn, Nina Nastasia, Kemper Norton www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...

Somehow only now learning, in late, late 2024, that Sheryl Sandberg & Bobby Kotick used to be an item?

KO_OP is offering art to anyone who donates to help Lebanon and Palestine. Donate $20 USD or more and select some art from our roster of artists. I'm contributing some of my block prints, carved and printed by hand, by me! Go check it out!! More info: bit.ly/3Zrw04X