We’re recruiting a postdoc and up to 3 research assistants at the Creative Media Policy Observatory (www.cmpo.net), City University of Hong Kong.
Apply for the RA position: www.cityu.edu.hk/hro/en/job/c...
Apply for the postdoc position: www.cityu.edu.hk/hro/en/job/c...
Friends! The ITU is hiring! We're looking for a tech-savvy person who can help us develop the games program and the Center for Digital Play research profile: candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me!
Happy to have been part of this conference. I had a blast! Thank you for organising gachacon, @leonxiao.com and team!
If any journalists want to know about the parallel development of BL and slash fandom, i.e. fujoshi vs media fans, I wrote about this at length in my book to drive the point home that they aren't the same thing. You can read Manga's First Century, or you can talk to me! bookshop.org/p/books/mang...
Next week Monday (2.3.'26) I'll give an Open Class lecture on the Monetisation of characters in gacha games. Expect some rambling about Love and Deepspace.
It'll take place at at Universidade do Porto, and is open to all.
Really excited to be there and give a talk!
sigarra.up.pt/fbaup/pt/NOT...
Please be free to download and read the PhD dissertation of Elisa Wiik on “lapsed players”. The public defence will take place on Friday March 20 at noon (Finnish time) in Tampere, and an online stream will also be available.
trepo.tuni.fi/handle/10024...
It's out! Check out my article, "From Analog to Interactive Haunting: Fake Documentary 'Q' and the Remediation of Japanese Horror" in JCMS. If you don't have access to JCMS message me here or email me and I'll happily send you a copy. quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jcms/issues/
Publication announcement! I can now retire in peace: together with my friend Bo Kampmann Walther, I have written a book about football (aka soccer, fodbold, or fútbol).
The book is out i April 15 from Routledge/CRC Press: www.routledge.com/The-Laws-of-...
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Hi! I have a new, quirky article out on how games use and represent the dead, but also on deadpool games, & the strange case of the #Fantamorto (an Italian fantasy sport).
>> gamestudies.org/2601/article... <<
🚨WARNING🚨: it might contain traces of @ckunzelman.bsky.social and @maurovanetti.itch.io
As you may know, we are running a conference on games, play, and climate futures in May at the ITU Copenhagen: playingfutures.today
Some news: the deadline for abstracts has been extended to February 20th. Now you have no excuses left not to submit!
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...
Do you ever wonder about game fandom and different types of fans? I was reflecting a lot on gatekeeping and different play styles lately, thanks to Silksong. I thought I'd bundle my ideas in a blog, and made a typology to go along with it! (Shaw!) #gamestudies nicollelamerichs.com/2026/01/28/s...
SCHOLAR'S CODEX - preorders now launched!
A collection of essays on Souls games written by academics from at least three continents. Each chapter takes it starting point from an item in one of the Souls games to talk about existentialism, humanity, irony, disempowerment, time and more.
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...
📡 Signal blasting for new followers: I wanna do a lil intro abt ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories @romchip.bsky.social b/c we got an important fundraiser coming up in a few weeks.
It's a free, open-access journal dedicated to game history, and if you love games, here's why you should care 🕹️🎲🀄🎯
A thread on ZEN AND SLOW GAMES (MIT Press, 2026)
I just discovered that our book PERSPECTIVES ON THE EUROPEAN VIDEOGAME has been released in paperback with a much more affordable price: 42€ (instead of the 120€ of the hardback)
Good moment to give it a chance and think about what the European videogame is!
www.routledge.com/.../Navarr.....
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...
My interest is to see what will happen with the Zelda and Splatoon amiibo for New Horizons. Most of them aren't new. I expect them to rise in price and become harder to buy for the next few weeks, but unless Nintendo releases specially new Amiibo for New Horizons, I expect things to go mild. (7/7)
The Sanrio card pack was sold out in minutes only to appear on online through private vendors for a much higher price than the original price.
This isn't anything new, as a similar incident happened during the collab between the Van Gogh Museum and Pokémon: www.polygon.com/23894429/pok... (6/7)
New Horizons' 3.0 update re-introduces four villagers (Tulin, Mineru, Cece, and Viche), which players can get by using Nintendo's Amiibo toys, as a collab of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and Splatoon 3.
This is similar to New Horizons' Amiibo Sanrio Collaboration Pack in 2021. (5/7)
Since then, the use of randomized game characters have become more common and visible as a monetization strategy across games, in particular free-to-play games. But also as physical objects, like randomized toys in blind boxes. Often, these strategies border on gambling-like practices. (4/7)
The article was my first explicit work on game characters as fuel to monetize videogames. The Animal Crossing series has always been using randomized characters to populate players' towns, but the Switch's online communication features facilitated the characters to become currencies. (3/7)
I wrote this article to highlight the risks players took to obtain desirable villagers to decorate their islands with. certain characters were so popular, players would use in-game currencies like Nook tickets and bells, and sometimes even real money, to buy villagers from strangers. (2/7)
Animal Crossing: New Horizons' 3.0 version update is now out. I want to use it as an opportunity to briefly reflect on my 2022 article on New Horizons' character trade.
cris.tuni.fi/ws/portalfil...
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Congratulations, Cathy!! 🤩
Nieuwe publicatie in Tijdschrift voor Communicatiewetenschap! We onderzochten de rol van gamemotieven in het voorspellen van problematisch gamegedrag bij adolescenten, aan de hand van een survey bij 619 Vlaamse gamende adolescenten (11-19 jaar oud, 53% jongens), afgenomen op twee meetmomenten.
ZEN AND SLOW GAMES will be out in 11 days!
You can already pre-order it, ask your favourite bookshop to do so, or save the url for the open access pdf.
If you have a podcast, website, fanzine, or any other space where you want to ask me about it, you know where to find me :)
One more week to submit to this wonderful event - gogogogogogogo!
The article by @gutierrezcarrera.bsky.social and me is now out! Julián has created an entire thread to summarize our argument in the article (below).
The article is open access, freely available in the journal Thanatos: journal.fi/thanatos/art...
