Peter McDonald

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 hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead 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.

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.

​Book cover for Hermes III: Translation by Michel Serres, translated by Randolph Burks. At top, thin perspective lines from top and bottom converge at two offset points. Author name over this. At bottom, title in dark orange background.

Book cover for The Impossible Reversal: A History of How We Play by Peter D. McDonald. A paper fortune teller with red leaves carrying the title in white against a green felt background.

Book cover for Border Mediascapes: Cinematic Itineraries at the Edge of Europe by Francesco Zucconi. Pixelated blue image of rippling water. Title in white, broken into several right angles arranged top to bottom.

Book cover for Out of the Blue: New Short Fiction from Iceland, compiles by Helen Mitsios with foreword by Sjón. Background in shades of blue. Title, subtitle, and credits appear in san-serif font, as if on surface that is curling into itself.

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

I can't wait! I just taught Redder today in my class, and would love to incorporate this pairing

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

Peter D. McDonald's "The Impossible Reversal" Peter D. McDonald is associate professor of design, informal, and creative education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the...

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

I haven't looked closely, but odds on it being secretly outsourced to a human?

Einstein - AI Homework Agent Einstein logs into Canvas and does your homework automatically. He has his own computer — he can watch lectures, read essays, write papers, and participate in discussions.

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.

The Impossible Reversal Tracing the cultural history of play—from Fluxus to SimCityGames and gamified activities have become ubiquitous in many adults’ lives, and play is widely...

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.

def agree. though it did not learn the stylistic lesson of chill

Ooh, this looks great. Will you post if you hear about a streamer doing a session of it?

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.

NYU’s Full-Time Contingent Faculty Are Poised to Strike After trying to bargain a first contract for over a year, the union for 1,000 full-time contingent faculty at New York University is voting on authorizing a strike. Contract faculty say NYU is refusing to budge on pay raises and job security protections.

"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.

Symbiotic fungi that, in the wild, slowly encase trees in a protective enamel.

Since chitin is also in the cell walls of fungi, what about using mushrooms to fuse pieces together...

Tunic, Night in the Woods Publisher Says TikTok Is Creating and Running Racist GenAI Ads for Its Games Without Permission - IGN Publisher Finji says that TikTok has been using generative AI to modify its ads on the platform without permission and pushing those ads to its users without Finji's knowledge, including at least one ...

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...

GitHub - iorate/ublacklist: Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results Blocks specific sites from appearing in Google search results - iorate/ublacklist

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...

Rejection Letters from DriveThruRPG, the Role-Playing Game

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.

Not to self promote, but because sharing work and having others dig into it with thoughtful passion is my driving pleasure in academia: I think you might like The Impossible Reversal.

imagine if all that money had gone to teachers instead

Tutorial What is Battle City? Battle City is chaos. Battle City is hard. Battle City is challenging. Battle City is the ultimate test of skill. The ultimate test of leadership. The ultimate test of teamwork…

battlecity.wordpress.com/tutorial/

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

Not the history you're discussing exactly, in The Impossible Reversal (out in Feb!) I trace the uptake of roleplaying as a therapeutic practice in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s by the OSS, management training, and public school teachers

...is essential reading for scholars of play and games alike—and perhaps even the seed of a new and exciting field of play studies."