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)

Has anyone build an easy AI scraper poison pill? Something that would add a bunch of garbage data that is invisible to human users but visible to crawlers?

The End of Gameplay is out RIGHT NOW! My masterpiece. A pixel art adventure through my mind, broken by kill gameplay 🔪 love, droqen store.steampowered.com/app/3120040/...

LOOK AT THIS

Submissions for the 2025 GEE! Awards are now open. There are categories for formal learning, informal learning, analog games, and games by small studios. I've judged the analog games in past years and love seeing the variety and experimentation that people develop. www.geeawards.com

I just learned the exciting hack that you can prevent Google’s AI from showing up at the top of your results by including a curse word, which has given me the perfect excuse to start every query with “fucking.”

In another of the year's in-depth Q&As, @nothingunfinished.bsky.social spoke with UW-Madison professor @pdmcdonald.bsky.social in August about his book "Run And Jump: The Meaning Of The 2D Platformer" tonemadison.com/articles/fun...

Some love from (and for) The Video Game Library

(37/?) Ending my list with some oddballs. My favorite platformer of 2024 was Goodboy Galaxy. It gives the player three tools--a gun, a shield, a jump--but charts multiple paths per level by stripping one of the three. A total surprise, inventive and charming, with Mario 64 as my closest referent.

(27/?) Continuing my year of platformers in 2024 with some smaller games from itch.io. First up is Frogfall, a game about planning out a series of jumps without landing. It gets a lot of depth and variation out of that simple idea. kultisti.itch.io/frogfall

Saw this useful set of block/mute lists in my feed, thought it would be helpful to share. bsky.app/profile/skys...

(14/?) UFO 50 was an amazing gift this year, with several platformers that deserve mention. It imagines a forgotten console from the 1980s with 50 original games. That context makes allows a return to abandoned styles of arcade and couch co-op gaming, while incorporating modern design sensibilities.

Just saw that Indie Games Plus is back up and running. Thrilled to see this coverage of smaller games indiegamesplus.com And a great thing to support on Patreon.

(9/?) Another type of metroidvania this year has roots in the work of @nifflas.bsky.social (I think). The gnomic creatures of Animal Well remind me of Knytt Stories, and its electric palette of Uurnog. Its secrets are not so much demands to collect stuff as whispers that get under your skin.

(6/?) Continuing coverage of my year in 2024 platformers. Hollow Knight continues to dramatically shape the current landscape. With one of the best being the beautifully drawn precision combat game Nine Sols. However this game has no chill. There is nary an enemy that lets you stop paying attention.