I love watching academic publishers exploit authors works for these pointless applications for generative AI in a foolish effort to 'summarise' research papers.

My guys, abstracts are a thing for a reason.

ACM #chi2026 authors: ACM is doing slopcasts for your papers. Just because they don't offer an opt-out doesn't mean you shouldn't protest this surrender to wasteful mediocrity. Feel free to repurpose what I wrote about the slop 'summaries' codeberg.org/mdingemanse/...

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The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts | Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

This morning at #CHI2026, @hibbythach.com will be presenting our paper "The Burden of Bearing Witness: Digital Practices of Marginalized Social Media Users in High-Stakes Contexts," led by Senami Kojah and co-authored with @michaelannephd.bsky.social.

paper link: dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Where an idea is believed to come from matters. And when those origins are obscured, things get really interesting. That's the basis of my latest *open access* chapter, 'The Obscurity of Origins in Reality Formation: Slender Man and Digital Mythology'.

the first paper from my phd project is now out and i'm presenting it tomorrow morning at #chi2026! it's an explorative design project about supporting players' rule experimentation through game design. you can read/download from this link dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

The paper is now officially out in the #chi2026 proceedings!

You can download the dataset, as well as the autoethnographic memos, as Supplementary Material

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

My new book "Artificial Religion" is published today by @mitpress.bsky.social !!!

mitpress.mit.edu/978026205221...

Friends!
New book announcement!
It’s finally out!
Bo Kampmann Walther and me have written The Laws of the Game: A Game Studies Book About Soccer, and now you can buy it: www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

Hot Connections: Why Sexual Platforms Matter A rethinking of “the social” in social media which includes the sexual.What can we learn from including sexual platforms in definitions of social media and

Our book with @jenmadelene.bsky.social and @kattiid.bsky.social is not only out, but available for OA downloading. Voilà!

#NorthernStarSymposium #NorthernStar2026 You thought it was too late to submit, didn't you? No worries, the second deadline is April 20th, for those who did not make the first deadline. All three keynotes are now announced: www.nord.no/en/events/re...

We'll host a conference on the convergence between videogames and gambling in late September 2026 in Hong Kong. 🇭🇰🇨🇳

Call for papers: tinyurl.com/thegamblingcfp

Let’s think “outside of the loot box.”

Abstract deadline: 26 June 2026
Results notification: 20 July 2026
Conference: 28–29 September 2026

This is an amazing find. The article rightly points out the technological and economic importance of the loom and the calculations it required of the women who used it.

Fiber arts, which are coded as feminine, still don't get the respect they deserve (cough cough Hank Green's knitting video).

Wissenschaftliche*r Mitarbeiter*in (E 13 TV-L)

Aktuelle Stellenausschreibung für eine 100% Post-doc Stelle (3 Jahre) am Seminar für Religionswissenschaft und Interkulturelle Theologie an der Universität Münster. uni.ms/gvb3w

22nd Spring Seminar of Game Research Lab on 5-6 May in Tampere!

Seems like I will have the pleasure to kick off the first day with my talk on Labubu customization practices and their discussion/organization in and through online communities.

Something for the fellow Arts+Tech crowd:

NordiCHI 2026 will host the track "Art-Based Approaches in HCI"!
We welcome artistic and art-based practice-forward approaches to Human-Computer Interactions under the broad umbrella term of "energy".

More information here:

sites.uwasa.fi/nordichi2026...

@floriankluge.bsky.social und ich durften eine @paidia.bsky.social-Ausgabe zu Final Fantasy herausgeben, die nun online ist.

Darin sind 9 Beiträge versammelt, die sich vornehmlich Spielen der Hauptreihe aus ganz unterschiedlichen Forschungsinteressen heraus nähern.

🧵👇

New CfP by @pachuki.bsky.social and me! We'll be editing a special issue at gamevironments and are looking for contributions focused on DIY print publications like fanzines, newsletters and even DIY aspects of commercial gaming magazines. #GameStudies

journals.suub.uni-bremen.de/index.php/ga...

Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies – Matilda Ståhl, Aska Mayer, Robyn Hope, Rainforest Scully-Blaker, Nick Taylor: Looking to the future? Intersections between survival games and survivalism... This post introduces SURVIVE, a project that has been a site of collaborative inquiry since 2025, looking at the intersections of ideas and practices of survivalism and preparedness in digital game…

SURVIVE aims at understanding the intersections of survivalism practices and digital survival games from a practitioner-centric viewpoint:

coe-gamecult.org/2025/12/19/m...

A picture of the mainbuilding of the University of Athens at Dusk behind a water fountain.

A picture of a banner of ECQI 2026 in front of the conference venue.

Travelled to ECQI with @matildastahl.bsky.social to discuss the role of identity, safety, and danger in "riskful" ethnography!
This work-in-progress brings together some of our previous experiences of risks and challenges in fieldstudies, using them as a base for our future work in SURVIVE.

Here’s a friendly reminder about the conference we are running at the ITU in May: playingfutures.today
Deadline for abstracts is February 16th, and the conference will take place May 20th to 22nd in Copenhagen. Look at our call for papers for more details: playingfutures.today/call-for-pap...

Toil and Trouble: The Labour, Duties and Rights of Women in Alpine Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period How were women perceived and treated in Alpine communities in the late Middle Ages? This study explores this question by using sources ranging from the fourteenth up to the sixteenth century and fr...

🥳New #medievalsky #earlymodern Open Access Article!

It's about the roles and lives of women in the Alps, including:
- How generic male language in sources hides the presence of women
- ⛏️ Female construction workers building roads across the Alps
-⚖️ A lord turning women into men (legally speaking)

Jetzt online: @fmaschewski.bsky.social und ich haben eine kurze Ideengeschichte der Space-Unternehmungen von Bezos und Musk und über den Einfluss des Longtermism auf deren proprietäre Infrastrukturprojekte im All geschrieben: www.medienwerk.nrw/articles/die...

Omg, congratulations, Cathy!

MAMG25 Proceedings

The proceedings of last year's @midagesmodgames.bsky.social conference are finally out!

All in all, we've got almost 200 pages of bite-sized papers on all kinds of ludic medievalism.

#historygames #medievalsky #gtp #gamingthepast #gamestudies

GachaCon 2026 is just one month away (12–13 February)! Preliminary programme: docs.google.com/spreadsheets.... Want to bag some GachaCon merch? Register for attendance: forms.gle/Mjk9tRo9TTSW....

Eludamos has a new CFP for a Special issue: New Perspectives on Men and Masculinity in Gaming

Eludamos invites scholars in game studies and beyond to submit full papers for a special issue on men and masculinity in gaming, with deadline March 15, 2026.

The article @jjol33n.bsky.social and I have been working on, "Ludic Representations of Suicide Livestreams in the Japanese Videogame NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD," is now out on the journal Thanatos.

(1/7)

The Role of Enemies in Military Shooter Video Games: On Hostile Ground This book delivers a unique way of understanding the heart of every first‑person military shooter game – its enemies – from within the genre itself to present a nuanced view of opponents in war games....

New year, new publication alert - and this is a big one for me. My book "The Role of Enemies in Military Shooter Video Games" is out! It’s an attempt to provide a systematic framework for analyzing enemies in military shooters.
www.routledge.com/The-Role-of-...

Just made a quick video of my #envhist #medievalsky talk about human-animal relations "Exploding Pigs & Retirement Homes For Cows: Alpine Human-Animal Relations in the Late Middle Ages"➡️
works.hcommons.org/records/eq9z...

👀👀👀