Elisa Mekler

Digital Preservation of Actual Play All My Friends Are Stories is a project designed to help people tell collaborative stories through Table Top Roleplaying Games (TTRPG). There are so many ways to play TTRPGs: you can play them for the...

I updated my guide to digital preservation of Actual Play to make it easier to navigate & added a little diagram to explain the relationship between backups, digital preservation & digital archives

allmyfriendsarestories.neocities.org/digitalpres

Also, now it has a glitter cursor.

Thanks for hosting @richardstampdev.bsky.social! We are a 2-person team in Denmark here for #TurnBasedThursday with our:

🦆 BIRD
🦜 BIRD
⚔️ REVOLUTION!

It's called SPARROW WARFARE & it can be wishlisted on Steam... right now!
store.steampowered.com/app/3473440/...

🦃🎮 Creator Day returns this Friday with the start of our Black Friday 2025 Sitewide Sale. For 24 hours we'll waive our free on all transactions. Over 15,000 projects to be on sale from this Friday through December 3rd. More details here itch.io/blog/1124058/creator...

Glory Hunters: a Zelda-like action-adventure RPG using Game Boy style graphics with a unique and original twist. You progress through the game by obtaining achievements store.steampowered.com/app/2297590/...

Chart showing m to f dialogue proportion

The proportion of female to male dialogue in Final Fantasy. #advx25

@danieljakob.net You might appreciate this too

Oh hey look, it's my first piece for the AV Club!

here's a quick thread on one of those papers (all three are with @elisamekler.bsky.social)

bsky.app/profile/comi...

Autonomous Regulation of Social Media Use: Implications for Self-control, Well-Being, and UX | Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

3) this may be particularly relevant when we're thinking about digital self control and the attention economy and the intention economy
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Musk is unambiguously describing an escalation of the problems we identify in these last two papers.

2) we have operational theories that address scales of user motivation but we (and sometimes the psychologists) neglect the implications of those different scales
dl.acm.org/doi/full/10....

How does HCI Understand Human Agency and Autonomy? | Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

1. even well-meaning tech folk fail to differentiate aspects of agency and autonomy. Particularly we ignore different scales: what aligns with my immediate interests, what aligns with longer term interests, what enables me to engage and adapt flexibly over time

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

" I don't think there will be ... apps ... the phone will just display what it anticipates you would most like to receive"

An amazing illustration of the pervasive, problematic error in understanding human motivation that I've been going after in recent papers.

This is such a cool idea, and also hey, my Roguelike Celebration talk on keepsake games is up!

It's my birthday
Play my game

officialelectric.itch.io/ruin

Very much looking forward to talking about my book with old and hopefully new friends at ITU! Do come along if you can.

Tomorrow at @itu.dk (Auditorium 3)! Don't miss it!

Kingdoms of the Dump on Steam A SNES styled JRPG set in a fantasy world of garbage, created by two janitors. Join Trash Can Knight, Dustin Binsley, as he fights his way through the Five and a Half Kingdoms of the Dump!

And due out any moment now, my most-wanted of the day: Kingdoms Of The Dump.

A JRPG set in a world of garbage, written by a pair of real-life janitors. Featuring boss art from Francis Coulombe, creator of Look Outside.

Been following development of this one for yeaaaaaaaars. Great to see it done.

Florence is both a game scholar and a game developer, and their work on archaeology and game worlds is a must for anybody interested in world building, or the culture of videogames and how to study it.

(If you’re a game developer or game scholar interested in game worlds, this talk is for you)

Why should you attend this talk? Florence is one of the most interesting game scholars working on how videogames can be studied as culture, and how to expand the vocabulary we have for analyzing and making games.

How To Be A Video Game Archaeologist - A talk by Florence Smith Nicholls | Center for Digital Play How To Be A Video Game Archaeologist - A talk by Florence Smith Nicholls

Friends! On November 19th at 16:00, in Auditorium 3 at the ITU, we are hosting a talk by Florence Smith Nicholls. The talk is titled How to be a video game archaeologist. You can read about it here: digitalplay.itu.dk/event/floren...

Oh hey, that's me! Very much looking forward to giving this talk at ITU next week!

So excited to see this piece about a larp that's very close to my heart (and a lovely mention of my Eurogamer article)

Randomly remembered GamingSymmetry and the featured article series "The JRPG: An Intricate Genre".

Sad to see the site down. But at least the articles are still accessible (sin screenshots)
web.archive.org/web/20210412...

Why were there gender-balanced teams at Sega in the late 80s, and why was this never the case again afterwards? I also provide a chronology of the industry's pioneers in Japan, while addressing the issue of gender discrimination, before discussing working conditions more broadly in a later chapter.

Affordances and Design Principles of The Political Left and Right | Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction Like any form of technology, social media services embed values. To examine how societal values may be present in these systems, we focus on exploring political ideology as a value system. We organise...

Back from my hiatus on here to announce our first study on Digital Ideologies. With @jhaapj.bsky.social and @matnel.bsky.social we explored connections between the affordances of social media and political ideologies.
There are differences… 🧵

📄 Get the #CSCW paper at dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Team Ico’s masterpiece by looking back with 11 people who worked on it (and three who didn’t).

For the Shadow of the Colossus story, we interviewed 14 people including project leads Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido, hired Gravity Rush concept artist Takeshi Oga to illustrate the cover, and put together a 10,000-word story with help from @milkman.bsky.social @shmuplations.bsky.social and others.

PS1 Stories - Abalaburn is up!

Oh man oh wow neato

I'm doing a premier watch now. Why not?

👇
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDVe...
👆

Hands holding a copy of "Seeing Red: Nintendo's Virtual Boy" by Jose P. Zagal and Benj Edwards. The cover depicts a Mario game in play in black and red pixels.

👀 We heard Nintendo is bringing the Virtual Boy back to gamers. While we can't get you the new add-on, the story behind this unique platform is completely free!

@jzagal.bsky.social & @benjedwards.com's "Seeing Red" is available #OpenAccess: mitpress.mit.edu/978026204506...