Joleen Blom

Smart and delightful book, equally enjoyable @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social interview. @domford.bsky.social Mytholudics: Games and Myth @degruyterbrill.bsky.social
#GameTheory#Folklore #Myth #PopularCulture
newbooksnetwork.com/mytholudics

Recently, I was interviewed about my book for @newbooksnetwork.bsky.social by @janalena.bsky.social! If you want to hear me talk about games and myth for about an hour, please check it out.

newbooksnetwork.com/mytholudics

Zwischen Kuchen und Kommerz: Warum Game-Cafés ein ambivalenter Zufluchtsort sind Orte wie das Eorzea-Café oder das Kirby-Café in Tokio ziehen zahlreiche Fans an. Gerade in Japan funktionieren diese Räume gut – und sind zugleich symptomatisch für eine extreme Konsumkultur.

back in may i went on a little quest in tokyo to visit some game-themed cafés and the result is now on @debuff.de! a little piece on why these themed spaces are special and fun but also an extension of commercial franchise logic:

debuff.de/kuchen-komme...

Another new special issue, "Peripheral Religions" (edited by Carolin Puckhaber, Aska Mayer and Knut V. M. Wormstädt), in Gamevironments journal, at journals.suub.uni-bremen.de/index.php/ga...:

A picture of me!

I now have a website!

It's pretty bare-bones, but at least it rhymes! I'm hoping to get more stuff on there in the next month. Give it a look if you're so inclined - www.rainforestsb.me

Evaluating Student Evaluations of Teaching: a Review of Measurement and Equity Bias in SETs and Recommendations for Ethical Reform - Journal of Academic Ethics Student evaluations of teaching are ubiquitous in the academe as a metric for assessing teaching and frequently used in critical personnel decisions. Yet, there is ample evidence documenting both meas...

Kreitzer and Sweet-Cushman have a great summary of the research here. I am not joking in the least when I say it's easier to detect instructor gender than teaching or learning in evals. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

New paper!! Hermann Wigers and I used OpenAI to generate and analyse 11,800 stories "from" 236 countries: Norwegian stories, Chinese stories, American stories, etc. We found that GPT-4o-mini tells the same story over and over. open-research-europe.ec.europa.eu/articles/5-2...

Will do!

Your chapter immediately caught my eye, Dennis. Looking forward to sitting down and reading it. The few sentences I saw already already resonated with my own experience.

I'm very happy to have a chapter in this beautiful collection! it's a critical examination of the academic politics of game studies in the Netherlands, and of which kinds of game/play research get uplifted or sidelined during the process of institutionalization in the neoliberal university:

New book "Histriographies of Game Studies" #OA punctumbooks.com/titles/histo...

Lots of good stuff, I'm excited about this chapter:

ping @poppywilde.bsky.social @doktornick.bsky.social

On Kawaii Bling and Selling Cuteness Cuteness is a worldwide phenomenon. From Labubu blind boxes to Hello Kitty Swarovski, cuteness is not only geeky or childish, but extremely hip and happening. High fashion brands have started to co…

From Labubu to Hello Kitty swarovski, cuteness is hot! Why do we like cute characters and things? And what's up with this economy around kawaii bling? Let's zoom into the cute, the weird, the blind boxes and the consumption of it all! Hope you enjoy this new short read! 🌸❤️✨ #cuteness #toys

Platform-produced Heteronormativity: A Content Analysis of Adult Videogames on Patreon - Petri Lankoski, Thomas Apperley, J. Tuomas Harviainen, 2023 This article examines the prominent role of Patreon in the rapidly growing sector of crowdfunded pornographic games. Recent research has indicated that, on aver...

RE: the recent targeting of LGBTQ+ content on Steam and itch.io (see following tweet), our #OA article "Platform Produced Heteronormativity" outlines the restrictive self-regulation of platform-based gender and sexuality of adult videogames on #Patreon journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

CfP: Beyond Game Mechanics at City University of Hong Kong

Dates: 8–9 October 2025 (offline participation only)

[Extended] Submission Deadline: 31 July 2025

www.scm.cityu.edu.hk/events/beyon...

I spent 50 bucks on Pokémon Mezastar so you don’t have to.

This is an arcade game that was released in Japan back in 2020 but was just released in other Asian territories earlier this year.

It dawned on me in Singapore that this looks like a gacha game IRL. So how does it work? 🧵👇

"Manga are BIG. And in the growing field of manga studies, Andrea Horbinski's work is a standout. With years of deep research, rich new insights, and sparkling prose, Manga's First Century will delight academics and serious fans alike." -- Frederik L. Schodt, author of Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics. Worldwide preorders available now!

I checked the corrected proofs this week and the book is off to the printer, so it's time for another reminder that MANGA'S FIRST CENTURY is available for preorder worldwide!

ahorbinski.com/books/

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for.

Stop using WeTransfer.

🫠 A thread from @rainforestsb.bsky.social and my recent presentation at #ludo2025 (ludomusicology conference) which examines how nu metal and early 2000s gaming culture contributed to the reinforcement of white male anger (1/20).

My paper on my piece A Structural Plan for Imitation: Engines of Differentiation has been published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X

Date Everything! and our Parasocial Relationships with Things The 2025 dating sim Date Everything! is a cozy experience, set in your own home. The set-up is simple. You can date every object in the house, from your wall and ceiling to your coffee machine. The…

I finished Date Everything! and have a hot take on how this portrays our relationships with objects.🔥From commodities to labor, this dating sim has a lot to say about things. How does this relate to gijinka and our fondness for things? Read more here. 👇 nicollelamerichs.com/2025/07/06/d...

“by calling LLMs ‘artificial intelligence’, we’re not just mischaracterising what these systems do; we’re also impoverishing our understanding of what human intelligence actually is. We’re essentially defining intelligence down to the narrow slice that current technology can simulate.”

Speaking next week at @imc-leeds.bsky.social about somatic activation as a concept for ideahistorical understandings of medieval arts and medievalist digital games, alongside some fantastic colleagues of IMAREAL Salzburg!
If you are around, come by and share your favourite bloody medieval artworks!

Just finished my presentation at #digra2025. @nicolleness.bsky.social has excellently captured the essence of my talk as Love and Deepspace as part of larger trends of gamblification, women gaming, and otome games.

And we continue with @merlyn-seller.bsky.social on bugsnax where we eat bugs. I never played this but it looks cute! Food also relates to body horror, value judgements (eg.?calory counting) and social boundaries related to transgression, power and even Otherness #digra25 #digra2025

Now up is a talk on food aesthetics in Genshin Impact and The Witcher by Benjamin Horn. Food can be related to survival, health, coziness and eco criticism (eg. Animal as food container/resource) #digra25 #digra2025

Back after lunch for a panel on games x food! A lovely topic that connects games with health. (Love this in relation to players too! I did a whole study on Portal’s cake a while back, published in Eating Fandom). First up a very interesting etnography of food in esports! #digra25 #digra2025

i wrote about the hunger games! the learning lessons from the hunger games as games, a government that likes to play games with its oppressed population, and katniss who doesn't play along and bends the rules💃🔥

now in the special edition of eludamos on fictional games:
eludamos.org/index.php/el...

What can I say, it's a noble sacrifice!

For research, obv

My first paper, "Fictional Videogames as Framing Devices: Suicide Communication in MMOs," is out now on Eludamos.

In the paper, I argue that the use of fictional MMOs as framing devices serves as a reflexive narrative tool that suggests MMOs as spaces with their own internal rules of communication.