Frustration, Conferences and Ludemes I had some things on the plate and obviously, I got stressed. And, as always, it somehow turned out quite ok. There were two conference presentations, and a self-imposed paper deadline to deal with, next to keeping several (too many) side projects running.

This summer I got the feeling, that I’m getting used to do researcherly things as a job

Roasting my CPU I run calculations for image embeddings for the complete “Observing the Coming of Age of Video Game Graphics” dataset over the last weekend, on a dedicated little computer in the DH Lab in Bern. The process went smoothly and way quicker than anticipated. Having the complete dataset now with embeddings meant also having to re-do the dimension reduction and clustering.

I’m a Mediocre Minigolf Player I’ve been on two minigolf courses in the last two weeks, and both time I played ok-ish. The two courses are Miniature Golf Florida Studen and Minigolf La Pommeraie in Delémont. Fun stuff but also really weird. I talked with a friend on it and we figured that minigolf is like a mildly bad and dissociative drug trip.

Some thoughts on watching genre movies and observing visual clusters.

Thinking through Metadata This is a text that I started in March 2024 and wanted to publish on the Ludens Blog, but I don’t find the time and motivation to push it through.

ReAnimate, Montréal, Multidisciplinarity, and Method I had the wonderful and privileged chance to attend a summer school organized by Concordia University, Université de Montréal, and École de Technologie Supérieure.

Five month later, more or less I’m trying to collect some thoughts on the state of my project, in preparation for a Ludens PhD colloquium.

I finished readingy “The philosophy of software” last week and went half through “Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality” this week. The two books, on with a philosophical approach and one with a focus on everyday programming practices, are a great match and sparked some fruitful insights.

I’ve been left with quite some material to think through after the Leisure Electronics conference. My current reading, The Philosophy of Software, is expanding on that. Which leads me to an attempt of capturing the current state of that reflection.

The title is a direct quote from Pierre-Yves Hurrel, one of the organizers of the Leisure electronics Conference in Lausanne conference, which I attended this week. It is also one of my key takeaways from the conference, as well as my own presentation, Programming and Becoming. The conference concentrated on “the emergence of video games: Towards a genealogy of ludic practices and computing artifacts”, that pivotal moment when video game culture started to establish itself.