Content warnings have become a common feature on the internet. This is my attempt at trying to think them through. I usually write about topics that I’m more or less knowledgeable about, but this time, I will make an exception. I don’t have a lot of previous knowledge or particularly strong opinions about content warnings or trigger warnings, but I’ll use this post to try and make sense of them.1 What prompted this text was an exchange I recently had on Mastodon where a user had a strong stance on the issue. They might not be wrong, but I’m not sure they are right either – I’ll get back to it a bit later. ...

Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter alternative growing fast. What is driving its growth? [trigger warning: sex work, sexualization of children] Mastodon is only one player among the many that work using the open OStatus or the newer ActivityPub standard. Among those, however, it’s the most popular and growing pretty quickly, with over one million accounts in less than two years. That’s nowhere near Twitter’s numbers, but pretty impressive for a free software developed by one person. ...

Writing academic articles is harder than it needs to be. Writing research articles takes a long time. Depending on the data and the methodology used, there may be years of fieldwork or multiple experiments or analyses to be done before getting to the final part of finally writing something down for others to read. The final product of that process, the scientific article, is still pretty similar across fields and has stayed relatively stable over time. ...

Facebook assumes we have only one identity, but that’s never been true. Social media has to allow for multiple selves. One of the reasons Facebook has been such a problematic platform is because it forces its users into something social scientists have called context collapse. Context collapse has been built into how Facebook works right from start, apparently because Mark Zuckerberg has some weird ideas about how people’s social relations work and has been forcing those weird ideas on everyone that uses Facebook. ...

Most of the history of games has been an evolution from hard-to-use interfaces to better interfaces. This makes old games painful to play – I don’t mind that the graphics look dated, but having to struggle with old interfaces is too much for me. It’s interesting that some current games have made their interfaces intentionally bad or hard to use. Struggling with the interface is part of playing the game. Two such examples are Her Story and Papers, Please. ...

Frans Mäyrä’s An Introduction to Game Studies delivers what it promises. It’s probably the best introduction to game studies available. It discusses the central concepts in game studies, from the magic circle to game cultures, thoughtfully and clearly. In order to make things more understandable, it simplifies some issues. Mostly, it does this successfully, but there is one thing I think it simplifies too much. It happens to be a thing that appears close to the beginning of the book and is clearly presented in a diagram, making it easy to learn and remember. Because it’s so clearly presented, it’s one of the few things all students pick up from the book. ...