I recently came upon a philosophy paper that seemed to tackle a problem I didn’t know existed and had a convincing argument for identifying and perhaps fixing that problem. Good papers – especially good philosophy papers – are like that. They force you to look at the world in a new way, even if you don’t agree with what they say. They also tend to be easy to read without extensive knowledge of the domain they are contributing in, because they go less into the details of previous perspectives. ...

I’ve recently seen more academic talks where the author has been reading out their paper out loud in front of the audience. I’ve heard a couple of different reasons why people do so: they have problems staying on time; they are nervous about giving presentations; they need help to stay on track. Staying on track and on time is definitely important, so these are important things to focus on and reading a pre-written talk can help with these. ...

A bunch of role-playing game scholars wrote a handbook for role-playing game studies. It’s published by Routledge, but as an academic handbook, it’s fairly expensive. For Free RPG Day, the editors suggested that the authors would share their authors copies of the chapters they wrote – according to the publishing agreement, authors can share their own versions of the texts, but only the their own chapters and only the versions that precede the professional layout. So if you are interested in what we wrote and don’t care about how pretty it looks, here’s most of the chapters as author’s copies. ...

I will soon need a new phone. My previous one was released in 2015 and I’ve been using it for three years. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but in the current phone-per-year era of planned obsolence that’s an eternity. Because the phone is a Fairphone 2, I’ve upgraded the phone multiple times since getting it. It was running Android 5 when I got it, but now has Android 7. I’ve replaced the battery and the back cover. I’ve also upgraded the front and back cameras. ...

I’ve used the Skinny Bones Jekyll template for several years now. Unfortunately, it’s no longer supported by the author, and I started noticing problems creeping up, often because of the changes I’ve made to the template. Fortunately, the designer of Skinny Bones has released other Jekyll templates, including the one I now moved to. It’s more up-to-date and nicely built, but adopting a new template does mean that I lose some of the customizations I made to my Jekyll setup. ...

There are, I think, some things best expressed by games, as opposed to other media. When I say ‘games,’ I mostly mean videogames, but some of this probably applies to other games as well. I don’t think these are necessarily qualities of games themselves, but of how we currently develop games; nevertheless, I think these apply at least to games as we now know them. These qualities mostly come back to two things that games have and most other media don’t (or have less): procedurality and interactivity. Games consist of processes and players interact with them. Other things can also consist of processes and be interactive, but games are currently the most prominent example of both. ...