Jared Hansen, PhD. 🇵🇸

Rolled my ankle on the way to campus this morning, and I’m supposed to teach this afternoon… I think I need to find a stool for my classroom

Roll with Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons (Play Story Press 2025) edited by Suzanne Richardson & Edmond Y. Chang: playstorypress.org/books/roll-w... - in print or open access PDF! #analoggamestudies #creativewriting #dungeonsanddragons #dnd

Self-Generation Incentive Program The Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) helps qualified LADWP residential customers install solar and battery storage systems by providing financial incentives. This program supports clean energy...

This is amazing: @ladwp.com, the Los Angeles utility, has launched a program that will install solar+battery systems on qualifying low-to-moderate-income households, *for free*.

Yes: free.

If you know someone eligible, tell them to apply!

No worries about tangents, I’m a long winded professor myself. And your points about the genealogies of games is also important. I’m not saying that the three tracks were isolated, but all three grew out of separate spaces to eventually merge in the modern day.

Again, looking at the games in the ‘80s you see D&D-inspired strategy-focused games for PCs. Arcade games were borrowing from pinball & focused on coin-drop with fad-based games that would come and go. And video games were trying to bridge the gap between the two w/ inferior tech. to be affordable.

Even looking solely at the US, yes there was a “video game crash,” but the industries of arcade games and PC games in the US were barely affected. Pop. game history broadly needs to recognize non-US history and acknowledge that for the longest time PC/arcade/video games were all very different. 2/

I think it’s also important to get semantic about it too. There is a bit of push back amongst game historians to separate the three industries. While yes, we can call everything digital a “video game,” historically that term was tied directly to the unique technology of home consoles and CRT TVs 1/

I’m part of the newly launched game design program at Iowa State University: www.design.iastate.edu/academics/un...

Long shot, but did anyone by chance download Japanese game hacker makimuraMFG's VRC7 Family BASIC or MMC5 Family BASIC hacks in the past 11 or so years they've been online? His website is down and they weren't crawled by Archive.

I have no background in it, but I’ve noticed that blind spot as well. Lots of analysis of games as texts, or works of art, but not performance.

a cartoon drawing of a bear and a cat with the number 36 on their heads ALT: a cartoon drawing of a bear and a cat with the number 36 on their heads

We're looking to get a Game Gear cartridge PCB designed!

If someone with cartridge PCB design experience is interested, please send us a DM!

This would be PAID work!

RTs appreciated x3

One of these days I’ll finish the planned trilogy, as well as revise the books. I wrote them in grad school, so paying for a copy editor was too expensive.

It is!

Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars.

OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

Forget Tomb Raider and Uncharted, there’s a new generation of games about archaeology – sort of In this week’s newsletter: an archaeologist (and gamer) on why we love to walk around finding objects in-game and in real life

I wrote a piece for the Guardian games newsletter this week on my PhD research into preserving play experiences, and why I think that the most archaeological games are those that that actually make you *think* like one 🏺

www.theguardian.com/games/2025/s...

As an academic/scholar/person, what are some “classics” in your field other people are shocked you haven’t read/watched/played?

People are shocked when they find out I’m in #gamestudies and haven’t played The Last of Us.

Guess I shouldn’t dress casually on campus

In the campus bookstore today:

Elderly person: (trying to make small talk) “So what year are you? Freshman?”
Me: (In shorts and flip flops) “I’m faculty, actually”

Due to a file corruption I lost 5-6 pages of writing. Not a ton of work, but I found out about a week later so I can barely remember what those pages were about

Considering that Academia was my plan D as an adult, I could have been a few other things. But right now my plan is to open a Lego café when I get burnt out, lose my job to budget cuts, or retire (whichever comes first). Part of me wants to go make games for a living, but not be in the industry

REPLY TO THIS FORM AND REPOST with your game or any game you know that has been removed by itch.io or steam because of this ban and if possible where the creator can be found and the game can be accessed (No Piracy)

HUGE NEWS

I got contacted by a reporter who wants to do a piece about the MASSIVE push back against payment processors

We ARE making a difference

Keep calling + emailing!

Keep ↻💬♡

Don't let our voices be silenced!

What a good review, and while I understand why you withdrew it initially, I'm glad you still put out some of your thoughts on your blog. Bad scholarship hurts the field and should be called out

Mollie's totally random questionnaire Please consider the following questions as if they were referring to a new video game fanzine/amateur magazine project concerning a topic you'd be interested in.

For absolutely no reason whatsoever, I've created a quick survey asking about fanzines in 2025. It'll take around a minute to fill out—I really appreciate anyone who does, and who also shares this so others can too.

Again, asking for no reason. Just, you know, because. 🤷‍♀️

forms.gle/FeQsnT8bVC81...

Reminder that now my PhD is done I’m available for work!

Writing, narrative design, historical and narrative consultancy, research etc.

I’ve got a PhD, 5 academic publications (another on the way), 3 shipped games (3 more on the way), lots of experience collaborating with cultural institutions

Highly productive day, wrote ~3000 words for my book on #NDS #homebrew. This chapter has given me a lot of trouble though, I think I've scratched and restarted out three times now.

fellow nonfiction writers! if you're not currently saving EVERY SINGLE web page/web news story you cite to the Wayback Machine YOU SHOULD BE!!

no more dead links in footnotes!

no more dead links in bibliographies!

never ever forget how fragile the internet is—save internet history!

a cartoon of a cat wearing headphones sitting at a desk with the word expert written below it ALT: a cartoon of a cat wearing headphones sitting at a desk with the word expert written below it

Game studies folks: I'm looking for some reviewers for HICCS. Specifically folks with expertise in gaming communities, narrative in games, monetization in games, streaming, governance, player motivations, and rhetorical methods and frameworks. HMU if that's you and you could take a paper or two!

Is there a shared deck, or do each player have their own? A pain point I found when designing my game was that decks of cards seem less portable than dice pools, and they were constantly being left behind despite being part of combat.