A while ago I tweeted about doing my own variant of NaNoWriMo, in which I would try to work on a Twine game and blog about it every day in the month of November. I have failed to do this on two accounts; firstly I've only just started, and secondly, I'm not even (currently) making… Continue reading Twine for something different?
This year was my first time at EGX Rezzed, the games event hosted at the London Tobacco Dock from the 4th to the 6th of April, featuring a range of game stands but with a particular emphasis on indie titles. I had no idea what to expect and spent the first twenty minutes or so… Continue reading EGX Rezzed 2019: A Touching Experience
This is the accompanying blog post for the presentation on NieR: Automata that I did all the way back in September in Session 066 at the EAA conference in Barcelona. The paper was meant as a kind of thought experiment- is it possible to conduct an archaeological desk-based assessment of a video game? The assessment… Continue reading 2B, or not to be: recording the Reliquary System in NieR: Automata
Screenshot from Anna Anthropy's Queers In Love At The End of The World Introduction Better late than never, as they say! This is the very long-overdue companion blog post to my presentation ‘Archaeogaming as Queergaming’ which I presented in Session 16 ‘Play, Process, and Procedure: An Experiential Digital Archaeology’ at the Computer Applications and Quantitative… Continue reading Archaeogaming as Queergaming
In July, a black granite sarcophagus was found in Alexandria, Egypt. The inevitable social media circus of meme humour speculating about the contents of the ‘mysterious’ sarcophagus erupted, and this reached a crescendo once it was opened.
This is the companion blog post to my presentation 'Archaeogaming Is a Political Matter,' part of the second Public Archaeology Twitter Conference. My warmest thanks go to Lorna Richardson and James Dixon for organising the conference. I had a fantastic time taking part. My thanks also to everyone who asked questions and joined in with… Continue reading Archaeogaming Is a Political Matter
On Friday the 27th of October the second season of Stranger Things was released on Netflix. Set almost a year after the events of the last season in 1983, it follows inhabitants in the fictional town of Hawkins dealing with both the aftermath of previous supernatural threats as well as new ones. After marathoning through… Continue reading Stranger Things Have Happened
On Saturday the 2nd of September 2017, I presented my paper on Dark Tourism and The Town of Light at the EAA conference in Maastricht as part of the Session number 275: 'In Play. Archaeology in Videogames as a Metadisciplinary Approach.' I would like to thank Lennart Linde, Meghan Dennis, Aris Politopoulos, Angus Mol, Csilla Ariese-Vandemeulebroucke… Continue reading Dark Tourism in The Town of Light: Dark Heritage, Player Agency and Phenomenological Experience
It’s midnight and the room is humid. My thoughts are muddled, suddenly coalescing and then scattering like a flock of pigeons. I need to find a reprieve from the endless carousel of thoughts, because it feels like my head is…spinning. Reaching for my phone is a nervous tic, so inevitably I find myself swiping the… Continue reading Fidget Spinners as Immaterial Culture
Ah, fidget spinners, the ubiquitous and dividing product of our times. I don't know when I first became aware of their existence, but I am very aware of that existence now. You've probably seen them; if not being played with by idle hands then in one of the many articles bemoaning their questionable mental health… Continue reading An Archaeology of Fidget Spinners
