okay, seriously: if we were to corral this, would anyone be interested in contributing? Here is the google form: forms.gle/m2V4j4cDvwNu...

I'm honored to be included in this exciting collection of new university press books!

#TeamUP and #ReadUP in the arts, performing arts & media studies with works by @uchicagopress.bsky.social, @n-w-f.bsky.social, @cmupress.bsky.social, @nupress.bsky.social & more in the #UPWeek Gallery https://bit.ly/3WTl7XD

OPPORTUNITY! Creative Assembly - UK - Principal Narrative Designer Not affiliated. Shares welcome! www.creative-assembly.com/careers/view...

Reposting! Do you know someone working at the intersection of Interactive Art, Performance, and Games? We’re hiring!

Here We GO! Come along, my dearies! www.kickstarter.com/projects/lum...

Bribing people to donate to @ucscmonsters.bsky.social . We’re raising money for the 2026 Festival of Monsters and the $ is matched. So, if you would like me to make you an emotional support ghost, donate $30+ and send proof/address to ucscmonsters at gmail and I’ll make you one! bit.ly/monstergive

Bring the 2026 Festival of Monsters to life! It's Giving Day at UC Santa Cruz and monster matches magically turn $1 into $2. bit.ly/monstergive Your support means the monsters live to lecture another day, #give2ucsc @dsas #monsters

👻 Happy Halloween! What better time to discover the inaugural volume in Lever Press's film|minutes book series?: 'Bride of Frankenstein' by @shanedenson.bsky.social dissects the 1935 classic through sound, technology, and time itself minute-by-minute.🎃 🍿 bit.ly/3JzEdPr @leverpress.bsky.social

🚨CALL FOR PAPERS 🚨 The Psychgeist of Pop Culture: Chrono Trigger playstorypress.org/2025/10/30/c...

Come work with me!

 We've opened the search for a full time, tenure-track Assistant Professor in Game Arts at Pratt Institute. 

A good match would be an artist, game developer, or educator with an active creative practice in indie games, game studies and theory, playful coding, or art games.

In happier news: for Critical Inquiry, I reviewed @hagenblix.bsky.social and Ingeborg Glimmer’s WHY WE FEAR AI, which has just lately been catching some deserved hotness. 🔥 Read my take here: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/matthew_kirs...

So, today I'm announcing a new book project... and doing a call for papers: crpgbook.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/t... It's an anthology of video game history outside the usual US perspective - an accessible & exciting panorama of different realities - and I'll pay 300 USD per article. Please share :)

We’re playing the Ghost Town Pumpkin Festival tomorrow! 🎃 And we've got a SPECIAL GUEST... Join us LIVE this Thursday on Twitch as we play with the game’s CREATOR, @adamgryu.bsky.social at 8:30pm EST for a fun Halloween hangout full of ghosts, pumpkins & secrets! ✨Follow on Twitch buff.ly/JFTqgrY

Today Nintendo announced a Switch 2 and 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Why would they make a major new update for a game more than five years old? Why would they bet on nostalgia for something from the Covid-19 pandemic? www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/...

*Three* sandbox islands per player?!! We’re so back

Just yesterday I was talking about starting a new Animal Crossing island and wondering what that said about the state of my mental health, and now Nintendo are full on enabling me

I have to know some people for whom this role would be fitting -- come work with me (and other great people) as a Lead Narrative Designer on Project Sirius jobs.smartrecruiters.com/CDPROJEKTRED...

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.

So excited to be contributing an essay to this book. I’ll be covering one of my all time favourite games, Year Walk I’ll be discussing memory, perspectives on inevitability, folklore, and (of course) history

It's a good time to write a book about a single game/series! There's the great work being published by @bossfightbooks.com And now three of the best scholarly presses have joined in ...

Want to teach? Make/research games? Apply to teach at Marist #Top50 #GamesProgram. It's for: 🎮 People who make games. 🎲 Game researchers who also love to teach. 🕹️ Those who love both. Review of applications begins on November 1st. careers.marist.edu/cw/en-us/job... #facultyjobs

PROCJAM - the Procedural Generation Jam - is back for another year! Join us on itch.io this November for another week of making something that makes something - a bskybot, a videogame, a digital artwork, a dice table or something else! 🗓️ Nov 21st - Dec 1st 🔮 itch.io/jam/procjam

ICYMI, my new book on Animal Crossing: New Horizons is 30% off (w/ free shipping) It's a scholarly book, looking at ACNH through lenses like craft, compulsion, and community. It's also a personal book, about playing with my kids during the pandemic More details: press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/vi...

Really enjoyed my first time at @roguelike.club! If anyone is interest in my talk, "Planning and Replanning Structured Adaptive Stories: 25 Years of History" it's here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikrP...

It was pretty much one year ago that @ritaraley.bsky.social and I published “AI and the University as a Service,” a first draft, if you will, of the everyday history we’re seeing playing out all around us. www.cambridge.org/core/service... Here’s just a bit—we think we got a few things right.

We are throwing a party and you are invited. www.gamerswithglasses.com/features/hal...

This is all a question of the pleasure of responsiveness, and for me the best model of this is in @stcymsn.bsky.social’s dissertation. It’s been incredibly influential to my thinking on narrative satisfaction.

I think Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a *paternal* game. It wants to take care of us — and it assumes it knows better than us. Back in 2020, that hit very differently, depending on how you were experiencing the pandemic.

Open-rank, open-area search for six new faculty members at Aarhus University Computer Science

I think one of the underrated pieces of developing game AI is knowing what the game is fundamentally *about*, like what is its model of the world

Are you interested in doing a funded Phd with me on AI in Games at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Check out the details below and feel free to share. Deadline for applications is 14th of November. docs.google.com/document/d/e...

Pat Harrigan (@patguy.bsky.social) presents a chilling meditation on getting rid of things in "Pollution," the latest installment in his Sunday Scaries! "Used to be, here was a house of a hundred rooms. A sprawling, crumbling old pile of shit." www.ghoulishdelights.com/the-sunday-s...

New blog entry: The Pivot: www.antipope.org/charlie/blog...

It is not only the data in AI apps that needs to be examined for accuracy. Also, the role of algorithms in output needs to be clearly demonstrated. Testing coding and data for "The Flagrant Algorithms Visit 19th Century Feminist Publications" www.narrabase.net/algorithms/f... is going to be fun!

THANK YOU @uchicagopress.bsky.social and @anasalter.bsky.social for this morning’s coffee shop reading 💙 ☕️ 📕 Absolutely loving this REPLAY series! #Undertale

libtwee has now been updated to 1.0.1. After some struggles with GitHub Actions today, it should also use dependabot to keep itself updated. github.com/videlais/lib... Unless a new format is added to Twine in the coming months, there probably won't be an update for another 7-9 months.

ICYMI: “And now, a response from the leader of the frog resistance...” 🐸 🎵 #Colbert

I have a new(-ish) book out: *On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations* from University of Minnesota Press. www.upress.umn.edu/978151791501...

The news is out and so is the Call for Volume 5 of the Electronic Literature Collection. Thanks to an army of translators it's available in a bunch of languages 🎉 Questions: contact @zachwhalen.bsky.social @videlais.bsky.social Dani Spinosa or me @ elcvol5 [at] gmail [dot] com Please share widely!

⭐️Poetics and Politics returns to UC Santa Cruz! Organized by my wonderful colleagues. CFP below. Join us in the redwoods!⭐️ poeticsandpolitics.ucsc.edu

🎉🔥🎉ANNOUNCEMENT 🎉🔥🎉DAY🎉🔥🎉 Jonathan Rey Lee’s book on CATAN is almost out. It’s the first in the Tabletop Gaming series that Paul Booth and I have been hard at work editing this past three years. Anyway, the book is fantastic. Please consider it and share with the right people.

Hey narrative folks my team is looking for a narrative designer to come work with me in Iceland! If you have solid storytelling fundamentals, some technical experience, and live ops or adjacent experience, we are looking for someone like you! careers.ccpgames.com/en/postings/...

Waterstones are doing 25% off preorders on my book Super Nintendo this week, alongside other 2026 titles. Preorders are super important for authors so please, buy your future self some cool books! www.waterstones.com/book/super-n...

My new book Undertale: Can a Game Give Hope? is out today from the @uchicagopress.bsky.social Replay series, which is dedicated to short, personal takes on games. I hope it invites readers to visit (or revisit) the Underground and befriend some fabulous monsters. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

I have a theory that when designing a social simulation / generator, it can be useful to keep in mind a story you’d like your system to be able to organically generate. not every system should generate the same story but I have a short list of high-salience interesting stories I reach for. (1/2)

30% off and free shipping on my new book 😀

It's the #BookBirthday of Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Can a Game Take Care of Us? If you were one of the players swept up in the embrace of #ACNH, or one of the people puzzled by the whole phenomenon, I hope this book reveals something new. Thanks to everyone at @uchicagopress.bsky.social

Just wrapped this one up from @n-w-f.bsky.social and loved it. I too found solace in ACNH during the pandemic, and while I’m neither a father nor living with a disability, this memoir resonated deeply with me. Will share a full review in an upcoming newsletter. Add this to your must-read list 🙏

Can’t decide what to buy on Prime Day? Try: absolutely nothing, and then go support indie bookstores instead 📚