Today's free newsletter is about four signs that the AI bubble is bursting: Anthropic's services and economics are decaying, AI demand is inflated, more than 50% of data centers under construction are for two companies, and NVIDIA is warehousing $150bn+ of GPUs. www.wheresyoured.at/four-horseme...

I recently got to chat with Ruldof Inderst about The Impossible Reversal. We get into many of the big theoretical stakes of the project, and what it means to think historically about playfulness. The interview is up at New Books Network: newbooksnetwork.com/the-impossib...

That makes The Impossible Reversal like $20! Lots of great stuff at the press table this year

You can block this AI thing bsky.app/profile/atti...

As local leaders in Las Cruces make that final decision on Project Jupiter, consider if you want summer temperatures to increase 9 degrees Celsius 🔥

If anyone's at #SCMS you can come to the Optical Play panel tomorrow at 11am to play with my version of Shigeko Kubota's video chess (and see many other cool optical toys from Amanda Shubert and Meredith Bak)

"This study provides crucial empirical evidence that, without proper safeguards, the harm caused by AI-generated falsehoods in this population and task is more potent and robust than the benefit derived from correct guidance."

At SCMS I'll be talking about some work on Shigeko Kubota's Video Chess, from work related to The Impossible Reversal. To help understand it in a deeper way I built a piece inspired by it (and will be carting it to Chicago). If you're there come and play!

15% cuts across faculty and staff at The New School 😢

Ooh, my book has been spotted at GDC (in excellent game studies company)

@designermonicat.bsky.social is a rad designer, can't wait to listen.

The best time to stop using Grammarly was years ago. The second best time is right now

People tell me that AI code is fine, because you can run automatic tests. But tests can only tell you if code is doing the thing you want it to do. To know what it SHOULD do, we used to have requirements. But now requirements are themselves vibe-coded slopotypes. The result: waste and risk.

The deadline for Play Make Learn 2026 is just around the corner! It brings together educators, museum and library folks, game designers, and researchers on playful learning together in Madison, WI. It's a lovely event and this year's theme is "Scrappiness"! So submit something: playmakelearn.org

Callers to Washington state’s driver’s license agency who select automated service in Spanish are instead hearing an AI voice speaking English with a strong Spanish accent.

New releases: -Michel Serres's Hermes III: Translation -The Impossible Reversal by @pdmcdonald.bsky.social : a cultural history of play from Fluxus to SimCity -Border Mediascapes by Francesco Zucconi: on cinema and border zones -Out of the Blue: translated Icelandic fiction, now in PB

Critical Distance is great. I find it super useful for drawing connections in my grad courses to current issues in game culture.

I wrote a short thing for the page 99 test for The Impossible Reversal. Page 99 is all about the phenomenology of hiding: page99test.blogspot.com/2026/02/pete...

What me worry

A few thoughts: 1) This is the natural end point of treating universities as degree mills. 2) AI companies are pushing VERY hard to make students utterly dependent on them. 3) Do you want handwritten assignments, because this is how you get handwritten assignments.

It's book release day! The Impossible Reversal www.upress.umn.edu/978151791622... is out in the world. It's jam packed with 1960s art games, discussions of spies doing educational roleplay, electromechanical pinball cabinets, liberal theorists making baseball metaphors, and much more!

I don’t have the energy rn to express how horrific this is. Please submit a public comment.

Quick reminder that declarations of technological inevitability are declarations of power; they are intended to make individuals feel like they don't have the power to refuse a technology. It's a narrative intended to produce a power effect pretending to be a descriptive statement.

"Many of us who work at universities, not just NYU, have watched in confusion and horror at the way our administrations have approached generative AI and its integration into the systems that we use to teach." AFT has said AI must be a mandatory subject of bargaining.

We’re $2K short of our Tier 1 goal w/ 3 hours left. Final boss energy activated. ROMchip is 100% reader-funded. No paywalls. No ads. If we hit this goal, we fund the journal for another year. JOIN US: www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal If 100 folks give $20 we’re there. If you can’t give, BOOST.

Dug into this absolutely wild thing happening to Finji. The deeper I read into their increasingly baffling conversations with TikTok "support" the more I felt like I was on something. www.ign.com/articles/tun...

One of the things that has made bsky feel usable to me are publicly curated block lists. This extension for pruning search engine results: github.com/iorate/ublac... and these block lists: ublacklist.github.io/rulesets seem like they could really improve browsing experiences.

You can completely uninstall/disable copilot on Windows. Your system and local search will run faster afterward. www.howtogeek.com/how-to-rip-o...

I just got my author's copy of The Impossible Reversal from @uminnpress.bsky.social and it looks absolutely gorgeous! My deep thanks go out to Jason Weidemann and the rest of the editorial team who shepherded the manuscript into being! You can pre-order it now from the press or bookshop.org

The wonderful "Play Make Learn" 2026 Conference is back on July 9-11 at the beautiful campus of University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, WI. This year the theme is " Scrappiness" - which ties beautifully with concepts of sustainability, problem-solving, tabletop design, and resistance.

imagine if all that money had gone to teachers instead

Post a game you remember playing that nobody else remembers...

@uminnpress.bsky.social has the blurbs for The Impossible Reversal on their site ( www.upress.umn.edu/978151791622... ). I'm honored to have the amazing and generous Amy Ogata and Aaron Trammell as readers!

I'm in here!

Another Fluxus game that I talk about in The Impossible Reversal (www.upress.umn.edu/978151791622...) is Yoko Ono's HIDE-AND-SEEK PIECE, which reads: Hide until everybody goes home. Hide until everybody forgets about you. Hide until everybody dies.

The editorial board of Press Start invites book reviews for its upcoming regular issues! - Word count: 1200-1500 - Deadline: 31 January 2026 More information in the thread, and please see the attached image for the list of available books for review:

In my upcoming book, I look at experimental games by Fluxus artists. These have been touchstones for game studies scholars like Mary Flanagan and Ian Bogost, but usually only in a cursory way. I thought it might be fun to take a look at a couple of examples. www.upress.umn.edu/978151791622...

I've been editing the page proofs for my forthcoming game studies book, The Impossible Reversal (coming out in Feb with @uminnpress.bsky.social). I'm starting to get pretty excited! The table of contents turned out to be pretty enticing, no?

Dr. Krista-Lee Malone is live streaming with some of the finalists for the GEE! Learning Game Awards on twitch. Tune in here: www.twitch.tv/gameranthro

A true horror; a choice to know, discover, and inspire less. A victory for the reaction. An assault on our youths and future.

The cover for my upcoming book, The Impossible Reversal, is up on UP Minnesota's website! Super thrilled by this design. (you can pre-order it there as well). www.upress.umn.edu/978151791622...

I believe they call this "finding out" arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

You can read my testimonial on the KS page, but I *loved* BFF! The Golden Years and I'm so excited to see it in this finely aged version 💖

So Codenames (and thus CGE) has blocked me, a Trans developer and designer, because I had the nerves to send them the two replies you find below. Judge for yourself if these are worth a ban. This is their way of dealing with empathy and care in this ongoing conversation.

hi nerds! i released a new #ttrpg today. COLDBLOODS is a 3-5 player game about mercurial vampires. drink the blood of humans to gain their knowledge, be physically changed by your monstrous actions, and maybe - if you're lucky - earn the respect of your ancient family.

And now the more experimental batch! First is a proof of concept called Line: A 1D Platformer. It represents height by color--gray scale for platforms and blue--red for objects and enemies. When you jump you shift hues, which reorients the player to the temporal rather than spatial aspects. (13/17)

I feel some pride in the growing number of platformers made with GBStudio and my tool PlatformerPlus. For instance, Kero Kero Cowboy. So many frog avatars in my lists. This one has Kirbyish spunk combined with levels designed to coherently push one or another aspect of movement.

There have been a couple of big releases this year. I've been following the Siege and the Sandfox for a while (partly because it uses Unreal). It is a stealth metroidvania with a few really spectacular moments. But ultimately its narrative, visuals, movement play the same note too often. (8/17)

A couple of micro-trends that I mentioned in my wrap up from last year continue. The momentum platformer had a strong showing in SeaFrog, which elegantly combines skating and traditional platforming. It piles on style, and makes many thoughtful design choices (esp. with enemies). (2/17)

When I wrote Run and Jump (direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...) I thought that airing my thoughts on 2D platformers would let me take some distance from the genre. Actually, it has only made me pay closer attention to new releases. So, I thought I'd share what I've seen so far this year.(1/17)