Florence Smith Nicholls

A child pretended to be a mannequin to scare me, it's been a great evening

The Video Game History Expansion Pack – Pitch your story Today I’m putting my money where my mouth is and launching a new project — a book focused on game history outside of the usual North American perspectives.

So, today I'm announcing a new book project... and doing a call for papers: crpgbook.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/t...

It's an anthology of video game history outside the usual US perspective - an accessible & exciting panorama of different realities - and I'll pay 300 USD per article.

Please share :)

The cover for the 1990 International Summer Consumer Electronics Show Official Directory.

This year for Halloween, we handing out copies of the 1990 International Summer Consumer Electronics Show Official Directory archive.gamehistory.org/item/a4b7adc...

Photo of two pumpkins carved to look like cats, with ears on top

Carved some kitty pumpkins

Selfie of me holding a black cat. I'm also wearing a t shirt with a black cat onnit

Happy Halloween!

Sticking with the maritime theme! This time a Minoan octopus vase inspired design. I'm hoping to display this one coming out of water, so I tweaked the angle.

I have photographed this one, but I might wait and do it again tomorrow, because this is a very *wet* pumpkin (unintentional storytelling).

The Bathysphere A weekly deep dive into video games from Christian Donlan, Florence Smith Nicholls and Keith Stuart. No hot takes, no news, no reviews. Just short essays, recommendations and other nice things.

Subscribe here: buttondown.com/Bathysphere

Screenshot from the game Gone Home, piece of note paper with "Halloween Show" written on it

In this week's Bathysphere I wrote about the uncanny experience of returning to your childhood home... as a person who has returned to their childhood home for Halloween. And also how Lincoln Cathedral was once the tallest building in the world

Black labels indicate absolute biomass estimates, gray labels indicate the fraction of the total estimated biomass of mammals (see Fig. S9 for the estimated fraction of global biomass). Top: the total biomass of humans and domesticated mammals (cattle, buffalo, swine and others). Bottom: the total biomass of wild marine mammals, along with a coarse, preliminary estimate of the total biomass of wild land mammals, based on previously published temporal abundance estimates.

Fascinating graph shows the estimated total mass of all the mammals living on Earth.

In 1850, it was evenly divided between wildlife and humans + domesticated animals. Today, humans and their livestock account for about 95% of the total. 🧪

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm immediately wondering what implications this will have for preserving play and the contemporary archaeology of video games

And the genAI models that will be potentially trained on these upscaled videos

Photograph of a pink sunset over a Tesco car park and a headlight is lighting up a trolley shelter

Back in the shire

⭐ The ADS Data Catalogue is Live!⭐

Explore hundreds of thousands of archaeological resources including over 100,000 reports and 5,000 archive collections.

👉To find out more and start exploring visit buff.ly/BMulYqQ

Wow that looks amazing! Happy birthday!

If you needed another reason to buy this, the zombies say "traaains" instead of "braaains"

Call for papers: Mapping the Borders of Larp Research -The Academic seminar of the Nordic Larp Research Network.

screenshot of an archived page from CNET Gamecenter.com: Why it's vanishing: We blame Myst for all of this. In the olden days, back when the concept of a gigabyte was nothing more than a wishful glimmer in some engineer's eye, we tended to our beautiful adventure games, like the Quest series (King's Quest, Space Quest, and so on), and enjoyed our puzzles and our exploration. Those Sierra classics were gems of true puzzle mastery. Before them were the golden days of Infocom, back when Zork ruled in mere text adventures telling stories that were just the beginnings of interactive gaming. It was a wondrous time. And then Myst arrived. With its flashy graphics and faux interactivity, Myst drew in gamers like no other game had before. For many, the word Myst became synonymous with computer games. And the numbers of people playing adventure games dwindled. "This is too hard," some people whined. "Why am I walking around? Why don't these graphics look as pretty as Myst? Why is that thing moving on its own?" The number of people playing the Quest games diminished. People wanted eye candy, not real storytelling. Never mind the fact that Myst had the worst ending in gaming history; never mind the fact that Myst's idea of interactivity involved sparse clicks followed by hours of skull scratching. True adventure games came--Grim Fandango, Blade Runner, Gabriel Knight 3--and they failed to get sales. Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories. People want it simple. Even in the fight between two first-person shooters with adventure leanings, the simpler of the two (Half-Life) won out over the more imaginative (System Shock 2). The golden days are gone; the dream is over. Casual gamers killed adventure gaming, and Myst made them do it. We wish we could tell you that adventure games have a place in the future of gaming. We wish we could tell you that. But we're sorry to say th…

The most fun thing about games journalism archeology isn't reading appallingly misguided takes from the year 2000...

It's seeing the ad for Neoplanet still pulsing away in the corner of a semi-ancient version of CNET.

Thank you, @archive.org. None of this would be possible without you.

<sighs in Neurocracy>

"While OpenAI appears to have succeeded in making ChatGPT safer, the data it shared has significant limitations. The company designed its own benchmarks, and it's unclear how these metrics translate into real-world outcomes."

PROCJAM - The Procedural Generation Jam A game jam from 2025-11-21 to 2025-12-01 hosted by PROCJAM. Let's Make Something! PROCJAM - the Procedural Generation Jam - is a creative coding jam about making things that make things. This normally...

PROCJAM - the Procedural Generation Jam - is back for another year! Join us on itch.io this November for another week of making something that makes something - a bskybot, a videogame, a digital artwork, a dice table or something else!

🗓️ Nov 21st - Dec 1st
🔮 itch.io/jam/procjam

astonishing is absolutely the wrong word. it's disgusting, terrible, awful, harrowing that such a vast majority of trans people know how unsafe Britain is. but if you're paying attention it's hardly astonishing.

I think this is a good example of a personal keepsake *of* a game (rather than a keepsake game)

This is the sort of thing you should be all over if you're interested in cultural studies and games. I'd be all over it if it were a shorter commitment. No place like it in the world.

YouTube video by Roguelike Celebration Roguelike Celebration - Sunday

A reminder that Roguelike Celebration (@roguelike.club) is still going on TODAY! Grab a pay-what-you-can ticket at roguelike.club and come hang out in our custom MUD/MMO for multiple mind-blowing new ideas per talk.

(or direct stream at www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Xm..., but you wanna be in the MUD)

Screenshot of the talk with the quote "thanks to procedural generation, I can produce twice the content in double the time"

Right now @pyrofoux.bsky.social is giving their talk "We Are Maxwell's Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators" at @roguelike.club!

As a Christmas gift for an obsessed friend, I plotted the Caves of Qud world map on my Axidraw.

Thanks to @unormal.bsky.social and @jfg.land and everyone else involved for an amazing game!

I think about this a lot.

Dora Maar ~ Savoie Cat II (Chat Savoie II), 1935
#DoraMaar #Caturday #Photography

Ah thank you so much!

presidential groverhaus

Had such a lovely time presenting this and chatting online with people afterwards. Every year I'm reminded what a masterclass Roguelike Celebration is in running a remote conference