📢 Job opportunity #EMCA: 2 postdocs (80%) + 1 research assistant (50%) for a 4-year @snsf.ch project at HES-SO Valais-Wallis on AI in medical education and clinical decision-making. Start on 1 March (or as agreed), place of work Sierre (Switzerland).
Apply by 31 December.
Info: jakub.mlynar@hevs.ch

DiGRA 2026 Conference | Maynooth University, Ireland Join the DiGRA 2026 conference at Maynooth University, 14–18 June 2026. Theme “Intersectional Pleasures.” A global hybrid event for game research, culture, design, and industry.

DiGRA deadline extended until 8th December for abstracts and full papers.

www.digraconference2026.com

Tampere University friends:

Academic Board (konsistori) elections at Tampere University began this morning, and voting is open working days, 8am-5pm, until November 28. University staff and grant researchers can find the link to vote on the university intranet: intra.tuni.fi/en/organisat...

Truck simulator, trucker-simulators, and the containment of neoliberal capitalism This paper discusses truckers who play games (including Truck Simulator) while on the road. Inspired by the concept of “container technologies” and more recent work which distinguishes between cont...

🚚🚚🚚New article alert! Part of a special issue on games + container technologies, it’s about truckers who play Truck Simulator in their trucks, but also simulation, battlestations, and the logistics of work and play. It's open access, so please take a look 🚚🚚🚚 www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

📞🎮 Sidetalking: Nokia’s playful design gone sideways

Heikki Jungman, @t0mm7.bsky.social, Niklas Nylund & @sotamaa.bsky.social revisit the N-Gage’s sideways-calling feature.
💡 The article shows how cultural misalignment, not tech flaws, doomed it.

🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A Lift Home (S1:E3) for Dr. Joleen Blom - Sebastian Möring, PhD A Lift Home is back and ready to take off, soon! In the next episode (S1:E3), live on November 19, 2025, we will take premium passenger Dr. Joleen Blom from Lublin-Świdnik (EPLB), where our plane was ...

New stream of "A LIft Home." Premium Passenger Dr. Joleen Blom. Live on November 19, 2025. From Lublin (EPLB) to Helsinki (EFHK). Inflight menu: Transmedia storytelling and the dynamic game character. Departure 7pm (CET)/8pm (EET).

#gamestudies
#transmedia
#mediastudies

wp.me/p5EI1K-1tC

New Games and Culture! I especially want to highlight Leland Masek's piece on identifying playfulness. His work on playfulness is foundational! (I'm his supervisor, so I may be slightly biased.)

CfP: Nostalgia for the Future Book Nostalgia for the Future? Any books on this? No? Let's write one, together.

#Cfp: Call for Book Chapters - #videogames, #gamedesign, game communities, & playthings that trouble what we mean by #nostalgia

“ #Games and its Nostalgia for the Future” is edited by yours truly and likely published with Play Story Press.

Abstracts due Nov 3, 2025

Full CfP: shorturl.at/NCkzU

Meet me next week in Bochum (Germany) speaking about the concept of virtuality from the perspective of my own research, somewhere inbetween virtual prototyping and sensing.

📍 CFP DHNB 2026: Lost in abundance: Encounters with the non-canonical

Submission deadline: October 15th
Conference date: March 9-13, 2026
Location: Aarhus, Denmark

Please spread widely! 🎉

#digitalhumanities #glam #digitalculture

Reading the special issue on Fans in M/C Journal. The essays are very accessible and readable and diverse, do have a look! #fans #fandom journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mc...

Citizen-Facing Bidirectional AI for Emergency Triage The IT University of Copenhagen invites highly motivated individuals to apply for a two year Postdoc position starting in November 2025 or soon thereafter. We i

I'm hiring a postdoc at ITU Copenhagen with experience in NLP, who is keen on improving citizens' experience of health emergency triage in an exciting project with the Danish emergency helpline and the University of Copenhagen. Knowledge of Danish is helpful. candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationI...

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

niiice, congrats! ^^

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT! @mahliann.bsky.social, @marcuscarter.com, and myself have combined our collective brains and written a wide-reaching introduction to the complex and interdisciplinary field of Game Studies in this forthcoming book for Polity. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

Open Oproep Game Sector Professionalisation and Practice Development | Stimuleringsfonds For individual game professionals, game designers, game developers, or (temporary) collectives working within the Dutch games sector who wish to make their practice or studio future-proof.

For my fellow colleagues working in the Dutch game sector and interested in game development & design, the Stimuleringsfonds has a call for funding proposals you might be interested in:

www.stimuleringsfonds.nl/en/grants/op...

We are still looking for interviewees working on and with open-source software, especially from thus far underrepresented groups (people with little to medium experience working on OSS, those in mid-career stages (10–20 years on the job), women and nonbinary people, people over 45 years old).

📚💻💰📝
If you are thinking about applying for an ERC grant and want inspiration, I've updated my paper where I tell how I got mine.

It now includes the application (B1+B2), the manuscript for the presentation I gave at my interview, the slides, and the nine peer reviews.

pure.au.dk/portal/en/pu...

Who is really fueling your #AI? 🤔 It's not just code & algorithms. Behind every LLM are millions of people, often in invisible roles. Join us, @dataworkersinquiry.bsky.social, @milamiceli.bsky.social @superrrnetwork.bsky.social & on Sept. 17 to hear directly from data workers!
🔗 buff.ly/2ug32Bx

Conference-Poster The Role of Islam and Christianity in Public Space – Perspectives from Indonesia and Germany

The Center for Islamic Theology and the Department of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology are hosting the conference „The Role of Islam and Christianity in Public Space – Perspectives from Indonesia and Germany“ at @uni-muenster.de from 26 to 28 September. uni.ms/gkil1

Trying Out New Paths in Aesthetics "Trying Out New Paths in Aesthetics" published on 18 Dec 2025 by Brill.

Trying Out New Paths in Aesthetics, a book I edited with Zoltán Somhegyi for Brill, is OUT any moment! My article focuses on aesthetics of martial arts, but great authors from Saumya Suyal to Rodrigo Duarte, Myriam Ávila and Yvonne Förster discuss e g. virtues, AI & myths.

brill.com/display/titl...

There's another very kind review of The Middle Ages in Computer Games out on @gamevironments.bsky.social from @markusmindrebo.bsky.social. There's also a bunch of important articles on peripheral religions in games in this issue which are well worth a look. doi.org/10.48783/gam...

We recently published a special issue on Peripheral Religions and Games, guest edited by @caroleinx.bsky.social, @amayer.bsky.social and Knut Wormstädt! Four brand new articles exploring the topic, one report, two reviews and, of course, an introduction.

i think so! the aspect that might change or modify the aspect of "having" marginally, is that it's also potentially about "making something yours", as in creating additional emotional value through specific practices like dressing toys up, modifying them, etc.?

the gifting/trading that is there seems to be more limited to accessoires tho (clothes and such), but the meeting culture is still there, just..different? (still not sure how to actually define that "different" 😅)

the meetup and community-internal sharing maybe is still present to some extent (eventho more in virtual space), but with no trading and more about showing what you got maybe? but then there is a lot of this "knowledge trading" for e.g. DIY customization...still not sure how it fits into it all

The call for interviewees in picture form, containing more or less the same information (and a bonus drawing of a cat at the bottom left)

Do you regularly work with or develop open-source software? Then we would love to talk to you!

We are conducting research on how people think about OSS quality and how they evaluate OSS projects. We want to interview people to gather all kinds of perspectives. /1

Happy to let you know I'm one of the invited speakers to gachacon in February '26, organised at the CityU in Hong Kong. 🌸

This year's theme will be Genshin Impact. The event is free to attend, no registration fee!

Challenging Contemporary Thinking on Play This book challenges and criticizes over-used or lazy applications of play and offer the possibility into the arena of culture in conceptual reference.

The book Challenging Contemporary Thinking on Play came out yesterday. Edited by Victoria de Rijke and Rebecca Sinker the book explores play through a series of interviews/conversations. I'm one of the people who participated. link.springer.com/book/10.1007...

Happy to share that our Special Issue for @gamevironments.bsky.social is out now! Check below for the link and a brief run-through of the authors and topics!