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guyintheblackhat.bsky.social
Associate Professor of German, Niehoff Professor of Film & Media Studies at U of Cincinnati; Scholar of East German cinema, science fiction, and role-playing games. He/Him. Bi. Wears a hat.
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The most straightforward way that I support game studies is to bring like-minded people together to play games and talk about them.

submitted 2 hours ago • 1 comment

The latest Analog Game Studies issue is live! Featuring: * Postcards from the "Role-Playing the Humanities" forum at the University of Cincinnati @taftcenter.bsky.social * Mads Grønne Bärenholdt on using UNO to promote social interaction * Evan Torner on monks in board games. analoggamestudies.org

submitted 3 hours ago • 0 comments

As a scholar of this thing we call "immersion," I find the @rangedtouch.bsky.social GSSB podcast on Csikszentmihalyi's Flow quite persuasive: "Flow" as a concept is too general to be used as a scholarly heuristic. It is a self-help category that broke containment. rangedtouch.com/2020/05/29/2...

submitted 3 hours ago • 0 comments

Honestly, same

submitted 7 hours ago • 0 comments

I follow only prophets

submitted 7 hours ago • 0 comments

In Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai (1999), the fact that the Mafia is a bunch of cartoon-watching, whiny incompetents makes them no less dangerous in the end; it makes their frayed value system no less human. We must recognize the threat for it is, rather than what we wish it were.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

I guess people in the UK are proper pissed off that the Poles, who were, prior to Brexit, cheap, available, and competent, have all long since left the island. The local talent appears to be expensive, hard to book, and incompetent. This is a lesson about more than Brexit.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

When ya demand OCR-ready PDFs out of accessibility concerns (and, let's face it, outright censorship), and then ya refuse to provide a proper scanner that makes OCR-ready PDFs.......

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Darkon (2006) was an excellent documentary on larp, since it relies on building a strong relationship with a protagonist and also shows us the political economy of larp. Most of us are barely clinging to "middle-class" existence and larping is this hobby we somehow manage to fit in, because we must.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Expedition 33 was made thanks to a small internal team and a BIG team of outsourced devs. Most big games, and many small games, are made this way! If you don’t know a ton about outsourcing in game dev, People Make Games has done a phenomenal job covering it youtu.be/bm7KUE1Kwts?...

submitted 2 days ago • 7 comments

We released Wolfenstein 3D on this day (May 5th) in 1992. Here's a local television news report about it. What an amazing time that was. #wolfenstein #gamedev #retrogames

submitted 2 days ago • 88 comments

Some notes on what is to be found in the new, two volume edition of Playing at the World. playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2025/05/play...

submitted 3 days ago • 4 comments

Santa Ono, "the shortest-serving president in U of Michigan's history," is now moving to U of Florida. His appearance-driven leadership shook things up at UC, but ultimately created a whole slew of structural disasters that I've spent the bulk of my career cleaning up. youtu.be/Ff1xlgr6Kf8?...

submitted 2 days ago • 2 comments

Absolutely delighted that the first episode of the podcast I’ve been making with Ubisoft and HistoryHit is now out wherever you get your podcasts! We discuss creating Victorian London in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, featuring an interview with the lead writer ✍️ open.spotify.com/episode/0kTv...

submitted 3 days ago • 8 comments

I'll be on the Twitch show "The Research Left Behind" where I'll be chatting about the things @benjedwards.com wanted to, but did not, include in our @mitpress.bsky.social book "Seeing Red: Nintendo's Virtual Boy". May 8 6pm US Pacific Time - twitch.tv/professor_as...

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

There is no singular indie TTRPG scene. There are only multiple somewhat-overlapping indie TTRPG scenes and gosh darn it I love all of us lil cheeky gremlins

submitted 3 days ago • 1 comment

Monday morning, when you wake up as a professor who teaches and promotes foreign films:

submitted 3 days ago • 2 comments

I just need to say that I am who I am because @charliehall.bsky.social took a chance on me writing about actual play on Polygon. Rascal wouldn't exist without those first articles. Every founder of Rascal has written for Polygon under Charlie. The tabletop industry owes so much to him.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

You can play Star Wars with your friends, and not even touch the multi-billion-dollar IP! Here's a great zine series by @jpcoovert.bsky.social and @mapcrow.bsky.social called Star Borg which is, frankly, mostly already in the title. Try it! #Maythe4thBeWithYou www.jpcoovert.com/shop/goons-a...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Parents have been made to feel terrible about having little children in public spaces, so we cling to those few spaces that welcome us with open arms (and the disinfectant).

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

If you see this, post your getaway vehicle.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Wrote a historical piece that defends funding for NPR and PBS. Whatever their problems, we cannot let Fox News become our default "public sphere." There needs to be alternatives, including imperfect yet aspirational ones.

submitted 6 days ago • 10 comments

I have a draft RPG called THE FIFTH MOVIE and it starts like: "The first movie was described as an "adventurous romp, a tour de force of vibrant filmmaking." The second movie was described as "a fun, if superficial, return to the characters we loved."" ...

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Unterwegs nach Berlin! #UCInternational #Bearcats #StudyAbroad

submitted 5 days ago • 3 comments

the neatest analogy isn't to technology, it's to prion disease: it displaces a functional form with a nonfunctional and malformed variant that serves no purpose and ultimately sickens the body it inhabits

submitted 23 days ago • 3 comments

Every time we are "surprised" by an ancient civilization's advanced prowess doing X or Y, we should think about the era of knowledge destruction in which we currently live and meditate upon how many times in history we must have been set back, defunded, erased, sabotaged, and coopted.

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment