Incredible that they managed to get a working electronic dial-A-boy emulator running on the Nintendo Switch™!

Monday!

Were You There When They Crucified My Lord? YouTube video by Diamanda Galas, FM Einheit, Caspar Brötzmann - Topic

cool that the UK gets an annual public holiday just to meditate on how much this record slaps www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLb4...

Field Work 28th March 2026 Playing Electronica, Dub Techno, Ambient, Leftfield Pop. Experimental and intercepted transmissions every month with Field Work friends and family. Accompanied by GIFs at http://fieldworklondon.tumblr...

What are you going to do if they don't believe you? www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...

Ethics & Immersion in Gamer Life-Writing | King's College London Please join us for the third session of the Reading Group on The Ethics of Immersion: Beyond ‘Tech for Good’ organised by the Centre for the Ecologies of Attention and Perception at King’s College Lon...

Interested in how novelists, poets & autoethnographers write experiences of digital gameplay? Join us online on April 13th for the next meeting of @kings-dfi.bsky.social's Ethics of Immersion reading group - details & sign-up link at www.kcl.ac.uk/events/ethic...

We're Being Played In this Lunchtime Talk, Dr. Max Haiven will explore how games have shaped 21st century capitalism and how social movements are using games to fight back.

In this week's Lunchtime Talk on Fri 27 March, Dr. Max Haiven will explore how games have shaped 21st century capitalism and how to use social movements via games to fight back.

Book a ticket on our website: www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/13848/were-being-played

Sounds like maybe the Waddington book touches on this - was not on my radar but absolutely is now!

the DOGE gambit seemed to be less about doing away with bureaucracy than doing it better because ruthlessly. Reminded of Corey Robin saying modern reactionaries tried to reframe market activity as a kind of ennobling warfare by other means - maybe DOGE tried to do the same for sysadmin?

agree that a lot of this is already there in Futurism, but maybe there's something novel too? Futurism, like other modernisms, has a Romantic disdain not just for democracy but bureaucracy and bourgeois rationality generally - which is absolutely there in MAGA's contempt for the PMC, HR etc. But...

ofc neoliberalism was already (anti)politics as game design - calibrate dis/incentive structures to foster risk-taking etc. (cf Patrick Jagoda's Experimental Games, or @ellaguro.bsky.social & David Kanaga's Neo Lib Ear Zero)

Those get a bit jumbled up here (are 'illegals' hostile ghouls, NPCs, or bugs in the code?). Think Kirkpatrick's 2004 distinction between gamer politics (exploit loopholes in code) vs. hacker politics (rewrite code) remains useful on that front - tho maybe this is more a game designer politics

a way to hail particular demographics, sure, but also a source of imagery (as fictions), a lab for tactics & motivational techniques (as games), & maybe most importantly a model of reality (as software) - the interface subtended by a codebase which only the elite can, for want of a better verb, grok

What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government The long read: Steeped in gaming and rightwing culture wars, Musk and his team of teenage coders set out to defeat the enemy of the United States: its people

Kind of ancillary to the article's main thrust, but gives a sense of the different ways in which games have been a reference point & resource for the right... www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

So perfect that Dark Savior has a giant neon sign that reads "Jank"

Screenshot from Dark Savior (Climax Entertainment, 1996)

meet me at bar Jank

Albrecht Durer's 'Melancholia' (1514)

New FUNDED PhD opportunity with me, @doktornick.bsky.social, and @bomlab.bsky.social on 'Playing in Public: Game-Based Interventions for Sustainability, Community and Environmental Engagement' as part of the CreaTech Frontiers CDA scheme!
Deadline: 10 April
Details: www.bcu.ac.uk/research/our...

randomly wound up watching King Kong '76 this week after a long day reading posts about the strait of Hormuz & was not ready for the extent to which it's an oil shock movie - not subtextually, but in a "the evil oil corp who kidnap Kong have him emerge from a 50ft petrol pump" way

I talk about this in the book's manosphere chapter, but this PvP optic* is one of the things that links the contemporary right to gamer culture - no possibility of compromise, coalition, reciprocity or mutual benefit, only ceaseless struggle for finite resources

*or PvE, cf. NPC memes

(which I guess means women straitened into resentful wifehood are being offered to the 'often males' ones, but hey)

Note the zero-sum framing here - nothing is actually being offered to those 'vocationally trained... often male, working-class voters' beyond the revanchist thrill of seeing things taken away from uppity women with 'interesting jobs'

Select tickets – Gaming Social Justice 2 – REACH Space Gaming Social Justice 2 – REACH Space, Thu 21 May 2026 - ‘Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop natura...

Colleagues are running another games & social justice event at @kingsartshums.bsky.social in late May - come along to play-test some games & catch a roundtable on designing and teaching games about and/or for social justice.
www.tickettailor.com/events/kings...

sure we can talk gameographies but who better embodies the impacts of financialisation, globalisation, digitisation & the synthesis of new psychoactive compounds on our societies & sensoria, eh?

finished watching Adam Curtis' Shifty & can report that Sonic notches up two appearances to Mario's zero.

if the 96,331 words I wrote about these games doesn't convince you to try them, perhaps this exquisite montage of floppy Sonics & pachydermatous labour organisers & dreamy spritequilts & low poly Instituts für Sexualwissenschaft will?

just saw the Sect & loved how casually beautiful some sequences are (the drifting pollen!) & the giddy-making way the structure of the house seems to warp & expand, & the structure of the film along with it... Phase IV rocks also

A screenshot from the Sega Saturn game Shining Force III, in which an NPC guarding a library is saying "You'd never turn into one of those parasitic scholars, sitting around philosophizing all day"

also it's true, I
🔹💘 the Saturn
🔹think it holds its own vs the PSX despite a shallower bench
🔹reckon you can have more fun just reading the titles of Bulk Slash, Radiant Silvergun, Elevator Action² Returns, Panzer Dragoon Saga & Virtual-On, let alone playing them, than you can w/ 99% of N64 games

was especially nice to talk about games I _like_... The book is about how hard it is to love videogames unequivocally when they can be so reactionary, puerile, cynical & tediously masc, but also how hard it is to hate them unequivocally when they can be so absorbing, exhilarating, eerie, silly & odd