I’m weirdly superstitious about New Year’s Eve. I have this notion that whatever I’m doing on that evening will affect the rest of the year. Right now, I’m painting rocks for a LARP I’m running in 2026. It’s about being a video game archaeologist. I’m not sure what that signifies for the year ahead, but I’m willing to find out.
In any case, as is my tradition, here’s a roundup of what I did this year:
January
- I went to The Smoke again and wrote about it!
- I wrote this blog post about video game writing which I’m particularly proud of. This was the year I got back into blogging and really enjoyed it.
February
- I got invited back to the final year of the Hunt-Simes Institute of Sexuality Studies Summer School in Sydney and co-ran a Queer Design Workshop with Xavier Ho.
- I cut my hair short! On Valentines day in Melbourne! It was a fun adventure.
March
- I went to GDC for the first time, met many lovely people and gave out my zine “How to Archaeologically Record a Video Game.” This was also the year I got obsessed with zines.
- I wrote this piece about the Disco Elysium-inspired LARP 97 Poets of Revachol for Eurogamer.
- I started contributing to The Bathysphere video game newsletter alongside Chris Donlan and Keith Stuart!
April
- I presented my paper “Archaeological Gameworld Affordances: A Grounded Theory of How Players Interpret Environmental Storytelling” at CHI in Yokohama.
- I worked on the digital keepsake game ArchaeOS with Mike Cook, and it got written about in Rascal News.
- I gave a talk at the final Now Play This about “Archaeological Game Design.”
May
- I went to Sweden for a meeting of the Computational Techniques for Tabletop Games Heritage COST Action.
June
- There’s always one month of the year that I have no memory of, and for 2025 it’s June.
July
- I took part in Dagstuhl Seminar 25292 New Frontiers in AI for Game Design, and ran a working group on Procedural Keepsake Games. I was part of a team that designed the keepsake game, A Sending.
- I think this is also the month in which I found out I’d gotten my postdoc position at ITU Copenhagen.
August
- This was my “Hot LARP Summer” in which I did The Children of the House LARP (based on the book Piranesi) and another run of 97 Poets of Revachol (in which I played a giant rat) back to back. I was so exhausted afterwards that I couldn’t move.
- I submitted the short game Unfathomable to the LITHOBREAKERS game jam.
September
- I got commissioned to write a piece about video game archaeology for The Guardian.
- I went to Montreal and gave the talk “Contemporary Video Game Archaeology as Anticipatory Grief” at Queer Games Con!
- I was part of this event for Stefano Gualeni’s book What We Owe The Dead.
October
- I went to Poland for the epic sci-fi LARP Eclipse and ran around in giant domes.
- I gave the talk “Roll for Reminiscence: Procedural Keepsake Games” at Roguelike Celebration.
November
- I gave the talk “Preservation by Record: Video Game Archaeology as Play Preservation” at Manchester Game Centre.
- I gave an online talk for the DAH Lab at University of York, titled “(Not) Dying of Anticipation: Video Game Archaeologies of Contemporary Play.”
- I gave yet another talk, this time at the ITU Center for Digital Play on “How To Be A Video Game Archaeologist.”
December
- I made a fake game manual for the Game Manual Jam.
- I gave a talk at TAG called “Continue without saving? Video game archaeology as a hauntological practice.”
- I got interviewed for Killscreen about my research!
Florence Smith Nicholls 