Jeremy Antley

I’m at a children’s party. We are hunting for a unicorn to save it. The unicorn is actually a piñata. The children must now beat the unicorn with a stick to extract the candy within. Did I say this was a children’s party? This is actually an MBA course.

I went to PAX Unplugged and had about 5,000 conversations with fans, developers, salespeople, and more. I distilled the general experience into some predictions about what the world of tabletop is going to look like in the short term.

GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES ends the month pondering once more culture, media effects and violence, this time with a wildcard 2002 documentary that snapshots an era of which our own is a louder, coarser, echo: Michael Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE rangedtouch.com/2025/11/30/8...

Darshana Jayemanne and my 2012 article "Game Studies Material Turn" from Westminster Papers In Communication just hit 200 citations on google scholar

www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/1...

#gamestudies

Conspiracy Thinking Is Flourishing. Some of Our Most Popular Franchises Aren’t Helping. Video games may be turning players into conspiracy theorists, but so is everything else.

I talked to @ckunzelman.bsky.social about his Assassin’s Creed book, which turned into wide ranging conversation about how everything in entertainment is basically trying turn us into conspiracy theorists

slate.com/culture/2025...

Gladius - really fun tactical gameplay with a Roman setting. Would love to see a remaster with more content added.

Google’s Sundar Pichai warns of “irrationality” in trillion-dollar AI investment boom Sundar Pichai says no company is immune if AI bubble bursts, echoing dotcom fears.

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told reporters at a private dinner in August that investors are “overexcited” about AI models and that “someone” will lose a “phenomenal amount of money.”

He means taxpayers, when the inevitable bailout occurs, not himself or other executives.

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/g...

I still vividly remember watching a friend play this on PS2 and thinking, “damn, I must own this game.” I did not play games like DMC but it was so captivating, and the gameplay so fun, that I couldn’t resist buying it.

A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

It’s officially out!

Scorecard from the Deadball match between the Llewellyn Shark Stars and the Sellwood Zebra Mussels. The Shark Stars won, 6-3.

Played my first game of Deadball with my 5 year-old son and his Shark Stars hit a walk-off 3-run home run (hello, Bobby Witt Jr.!) against my Zebra Mussels. We ran with just the basic rules this first go-around but it was a great first experience. Excited to play again!

Screenshots of the following text: Statement on Educational Technologies and AI Agents The following statement of endorsement was drafted by the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching. The Executive Council approved it as an MLA statement in October 2025. Software, specifically learning management systems (LMSs), is as important to teaching and learning as physical classrooms and facilities. The recent and hasty integration of generative AI features into those systems is already redefining student and instructor relationships, evaluative standards, and instructional outcomes—with no compelling evidence that any of it is for the better. At the same time, so-called agentic browsers are becoming widely available to the public. These offer AI “agents” that can navigate LMSs and complete assignments without any student involvement. All of this is unfolding at a time when contractual arrangements between institutions and commercial vendors often lack transparency, with worrisome implications for data collection and student privacy.

Screenshots of the following text: The Modern Language Association therefore unequivocally 1. Advocates for full faculty and instructional involvement, including faculty of languages, literatures, and the humanities, at all levels of decision-making in the selection, procurement, and responsible implementation of instructional technology systems and software, including those incorporating AI.

The instructional mission cannot be fulfilled in the absence of faculty expertise, and this expertise extends not only to the “content” of the curriculum but also to the infrastructures and environments—virtual and otherwise—in which learning happens.
  2. Calls upon law- and policymakers, LMS vendors, and companies offering agent-based AI browsers to cooperate in order to prevent misuse and to ensure that academic institutions have the ability and option to block agentic AI when needed.

Without dedicated outside cooperation from lawmakers and technology providers, academic institutions may not have the technical capacity to do so on their own. If we do not act, we risk seeing the development of a fully automated loop in which assignments are generated by AI with the support of a learning management system, AI-generated content is submitted by an agentic AI on behalf of the student, and AI-driven metrics evaluate the work on behalf of the instructor.

Very proud to have worked on this statement of the Modern Language Association with @annamillsoer.bsky.social and other colleagues on the MLA’s task force on AI in Research and Teaching. It is a direct call for faculty input into Ed Tech decision-making, especially AI: www.mla.org/Resources/Ad... 🧵

An abandoned building by the beach where a window overlooks the sea. The water through the window resembles a painting, so someone has scrawled Free Rothko on the wall.

Good morning.
I don't know who did this, but I love you.

Hi friends! I am absolutely the worst at this myself but remember if we collectively decided we wanted to, I did create a #gamingthepast feed for BSky to aggregate. I'm trying to be better about that, because community is so important for history and games work. bsky.app/profile/gami...

Luo Chenchen is a master’s student in world history at East China Normal University, studying French history, public history and historical theory. He is deeply passionate about historical strategy games. He is committed to seriously examining the significance of counterfactual history for historical theory. [1] I saw the Emperor–this world-spirit–ridingContinue Reading

Everyone interested in #gamingthepast. Did you know that www.playthepast.org still lives, 15 years after its launch and Gilles Roy is steering the ship to provide us with new thoughts and analysis on games and history? 1/

Yeah, such a bummer that he was the lead runner.

The real journey was the (friend)chips we made along the way.

Save 33% on The Banished Vault on Steam A strategy game of exploration, endurance, and space travel on an interstellar gothic monastery. Explore solar systems, harvest resources, construct outposts, and face hazards in the challenging unive...

THE BANISHED VAULT is on SALE for 33% off. Buy it! Buy it for a friend! Help support development on future games.

store.steampowered.com/app/2341070/...

Mythic Bastionland by Bastionland Press Before Into the Odd

Sounds like Mythic Bastionland would be right up your alley chrismcdee.itch.io/mythic-basti...

Screenshot of the Viabundus website.

A neat tool I just came across: Viabundus, a digital road map of northern Europe 1350-1650, that lets you calculate contemporary travel routes/times. In 1500, going Amiens → Köln by horse took almost 7 days and 13 toll payments.

#medievalsky

www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/handelsstras...

WE ARE VERY CLOSE TO SELLING OUT THE FIRST PRINT RUN OF THIS BOOK! Please continue to buy it and send it around. It is available on all store fronts you might want to purchase it at!

Wrong Road — Real Life The phone is a car: a symbol of freedom and convenience that transforms into an inescapable burden

Feeling nostalgic for Real Life mag today. They let play with ideas like the "Joker theory of the administrative state: Capitalists sow chaos, without any particular plan for the “new normal” other than the ability to continually reassert their own dominance" reallifemag.com/wrong-road/

Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVe: The No-Rest Of It This is the fifth dish of the fourth course of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers, who made up a majority of all of the humans who…

This week on the blog: More Peasants!

This week, we're modeling the full(ish) structure of women's labor in a pre-industrial peasant household, very roughly assessing the work required for textiles, farming, cooking, cleaning, childcare, etc.

Now with pie chart!

acoup.blog/2025/10/10/c...

I had a great time on Aftermath talking about how you can use Assassin’s Creed as a method of tracing the pathway to the world we live in.

I’d heard so much praise for this book and finally found time to read it. It’s a fascinating read that pushes us to reconsider the Eurocentric nature of Marxist accounts of production that often erase the history of medieval slavery.

Dolly rules and non parents probably won't know this, but she has a book club for little kids and she will just send them books for free. my kids have loved them. it's a good excuse to stop doing something and just hang out and read a book with them.

Stuart Hall took Thatcherism seriously & tried to understand its affective & aspirational appeal. Trumpism operates differently, as @cnewf.bsky.social notes, but the need to offer a cultural & political counter-strategy is key. I keep thinking about Hall’s adept use of new forms of media.

Yeah I missed that they discussed this on their Bandcamp page on August 15th.

They released this album through a new label and that label does not do Bandcamp releases. I was bummed about this for sure. They have tried to get the label to change its policy but to no avail.

You turned me on to them and I’ve been pumped for every release since Monsters. Their live album is fantastic as well and I’m super jazzed to see the live next year when they come to Portland.