Jonne Arjoranta @jaranta@scholar.social

I woke up at 6 so I can take an early train to watch esports that is being played 1000s of kilometers away. All for work, of course.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/3ky45y/hundreds-of-researchers-from-harvard-yale-and-stanford-were-published-in-fake-academic-journals

Both researchers from elite universities that should know better and corporations peddling bullshit use fake journals to appear more legitimate.

> Taken together, the predatory publishers -- represent about 5 percent of the total research published every year.

When Zeynep Tufekci writes about the power of social media, you should pay attention: 👇

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611806/how-social-media-took-us-from-tahrir-square-to-donald-trump/

Her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest is available freely online (link in the footer):

https://www.twitterandteargas.org/

My review of that book is available here:

https://jonne.arjoranta.fi/2017/revolution-and-twitter/

Wondering how to get that one article that's behind a paywall? Here's a guide:

https://jaranta.github.io/getting-access-to-paywalled-articles/

Know how to make it better? Please contribute!

I tried finding a preprint archive suitable for my work (like arXiv in physics).

I tried a couple and ended up with OSF, which seems great. They have different sub-categories for different areas of research and are run a by a non-profit on open source code.

https://osf.io/preprints/

You can get a copy from Routledge and the ebook is surprisingly reasonably priced: https://www.routledge.com/Role-Playing-Game-Studies-Transmedia-Foundations/Deterding-Zagal/p/book/9781138638907

The preprint of my chapter is available here: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:jyu-201804061941 but it is embargoed until 2019-10-18. If you want a copy, you can always ask me.

"Role-playing game studies: transmedia foundations" is out. Just got my author's copy. If you study #role-playing #games you might want to take a look.

DiGRA 2019 will be held in Kyoto, Japan. If you study games, do take a look at the CfP:

http://www.digra2019.org/call-for-paper/

I just witnessed a sublime reading of Wolfenstein: New Colossus, arguing that it's tone is not inconsistent, but needs to be understood through Bakhtin's carnivalesque. I had zero interest in the game before, but now I need to play it.

My DiGRA 2018 extended abstract "Interpretive Challenges in Games" is available as a preprint from OSF: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jwb49/

If you enjoy replaying games or are interested in how replayability can be an interesting aspect of the game, you might like Save the Date, Oxenfree, Undertale or Nier:Automata.

If you're interested in paradoxes, you might enjoy the games Naya's Quest, Antichamber or Gorogoa.

Paolo Ruffino talked about games for the post-anthopocene: games that outlive us or that are not meant for humans. One example is No Man's Sky, which is -- because of it's procedural generation -- not possible for a human to experience in its entirity. Even the developers had to create bots to test the game because no human can check all the planets for flaws.

Going to spend the rest of the week at Digital Games Research Association's annual conference, http://digra2018.com/. If you happen to be there, come say hi.

I have a talk on Friday, called "Interpretive Challenges in Games," where I argue that theories about challenge in games miss out on one category. I use Her Story as an example.

There might be some game studies toots coming later.