New CfP by @pachuki.bsky.social and me! We'll be editing a special issue at gamevironments and are looking for contributions focused on DIY print publications like fanzines, newsletters and even DIY aspects of commercial gaming magazines. #GameStudies

journals.suub.uni-bremen.de/index.php/ga...

Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies – Matilda Ståhl, Aska Mayer, Robyn Hope, Rainforest Scully-Blaker, Nick Taylor: Looking to the future? Intersections between survival games and survivalism... This post introduces SURVIVE, a project that has been a site of collaborative inquiry since 2025, looking at the intersections of ideas and practices of survivalism and preparedness in digital game…

SURVIVE aims at understanding the intersections of survivalism practices and digital survival games from a practitioner-centric viewpoint:

coe-gamecult.org/2025/12/19/m...

A picture of the mainbuilding of the University of Athens at Dusk behind a water fountain.

A picture of a banner of ECQI 2026 in front of the conference venue.

Travelled to ECQI with @matildastahl.bsky.social to discuss the role of identity, safety, and danger in "riskful" ethnography!
This work-in-progress brings together some of our previous experiences of risks and challenges in fieldstudies, using them as a base for our future work in SURVIVE.

Here’s a friendly reminder about the conference we are running at the ITU in May: playingfutures.today
Deadline for abstracts is February 16th, and the conference will take place May 20th to 22nd in Copenhagen. Look at our call for papers for more details: playingfutures.today/call-for-pap...

Toil and Trouble: The Labour, Duties and Rights of Women in Alpine Communities in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Period How were women perceived and treated in Alpine communities in the late Middle Ages? This study explores this question by using sources ranging from the fourteenth up to the sixteenth century and fr...

🥳New #medievalsky #earlymodern Open Access Article!

It's about the roles and lives of women in the Alps, including:
- How generic male language in sources hides the presence of women
- ⛏️ Female construction workers building roads across the Alps
-⚖️ A lord turning women into men (legally speaking)

Jetzt online: @fmaschewski.bsky.social und ich haben eine kurze Ideengeschichte der Space-Unternehmungen von Bezos und Musk und über den Einfluss des Longtermism auf deren proprietäre Infrastrukturprojekte im All geschrieben: www.medienwerk.nrw/articles/die...

Omg, congratulations, Cathy!

MAMG25 Proceedings

The proceedings of last year's @midagesmodgames.bsky.social conference are finally out!

All in all, we've got almost 200 pages of bite-sized papers on all kinds of ludic medievalism.

#historygames #medievalsky #gtp #gamingthepast #gamestudies

GachaCon 2026 is just one month away (12–13 February)! Preliminary programme: docs.google.com/spreadsheets.... Want to bag some GachaCon merch? Register for attendance: forms.gle/Mjk9tRo9TTSW....

Eludamos has a new CFP for a Special issue: New Perspectives on Men and Masculinity in Gaming

Eludamos invites scholars in game studies and beyond to submit full papers for a special issue on men and masculinity in gaming, with deadline March 15, 2026.

The article @jjol33n.bsky.social and I have been working on, "Ludic Representations of Suicide Livestreams in the Japanese Videogame NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD," is now out on the journal Thanatos.

(1/7)

The Role of Enemies in Military Shooter Video Games: On Hostile Ground This book delivers a unique way of understanding the heart of every first‑person military shooter game – its enemies – from within the genre itself to present a nuanced view of opponents in war games....

New year, new publication alert - and this is a big one for me. My book "The Role of Enemies in Military Shooter Video Games" is out! It’s an attempt to provide a systematic framework for analyzing enemies in military shooters.
www.routledge.com/The-Role-of-...

Just made a quick video of my #envhist #medievalsky talk about human-animal relations "Exploding Pigs & Retirement Homes For Cows: Alpine Human-Animal Relations in the Late Middle Ages"➡️
works.hcommons.org/records/eq9z...

👀👀👀

Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies – Article Summary: Game videos addressing the fatal accident of Ayrton Senna as a form and tool of cultural memory (Malinen, 2025) This blog post provides an English summary of an article that explores the relationship between simulative game videos and cultural memory through the fatal crash of Formula One driver Ayrton Senna…

The last article summary of the CoE blog is here! Ville Malinen discusses game videos addressing the fatal accident of Ayrton Senna as a form and tool of cultural memory based on his article originally written in Finnish. Read the summary here:

Correct diagnosis: It's not that LLMs will "undo" science but they will accelerate its slopification because of the already existing perverse incentive structures that are in place. "LLMs didn’t create the dysfunction in scientific publishing; they inherited it, intensified it, made it run faster."

Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies – Jaakko Suominen: Stories of the Origin of the Finnish Game Industry The search for a definitive “first” Finnish digital game or the singular origin of the Finnish game industry has shaped historical narratives, even though such beginnings are often complex, contest…

The search for a definitive “first” Finnish digital game or the singular origin of the Finnish game industry has shaped historical narratives, even though such beginnings are often complex, contested, and continuously pushed earlier by new discoveries. More in the blog post by Jaakko Suominen:

Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies – Article Summary: “Me and Friends Got into Computing” – The Arrival of Computers at Finnish homes in the 1980s. (Reunanen, Saarikoski & Joelsson, 2025) In this blog post, Markku Reunanen, Petri Saarikoski and Tapani Joelsson discuss how home computers arrived at Finnish homes in the 1980s based on an online survey conducted in 2022.

New article summary at the CoE blog: Markku Reunanen, Petri Saarikoski and Tapani Joelsson discuss how home computers arrived at Finnish homes in the 1980s based on an online survey conducted in 2022.

game screenshot of a sexy guy getting fished out of the water

game screenshot of a sexy shirtless fisherman and behind him a rainbow-flagged Boeing CH-47 Chinook tandem-rotor transport helicopter flying in the distance dumping hundreds of fresh live sexy men into the lake, replenishing the depleted stocks for the sexy shirtless fisherman's continued enjoyment.

new game release: Rainbows Are Carnivores is an experimental gay fishing romance / aquaculture management sim. Free, 10-20 min, play in mobile or desktop browser radiatoryang.itch.io/rainbows

CFP for the next issue of G|A|M|E – Games as Art, Media, Entertainment, on “Queer and Trans Game Studies in Global and Local Contexts” is out!
This issue aims to map current developments in queer and trans game studies.

For full details: www.gamejournal.it/n-132025-bey...

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