Dr Laura James's writings

I'm excited to have joined the board at Now Play This , now a community interest company, and continuing to be a festival of experimental game design. We just opened up our call for 2021 , which will focus around the climate crisis, games and play. In similar vein, check out New Rules - "A collection of essays, poems and other writing that explores the repetitive, revelatory, grim, comforting, stressful, nostalgic, familiar and strange ways that play and games have fit into our lives during the Covid-19 pandemic." From my Now Play This colleague Holly Gramazio. Drew Austin on the state of the worlds: Venkatesh Rao wrote a short blog post last year about the perennially circulating idea that the United States is gradually becoming a third-world country. Rao argues that third world status is both too optimistic and too pessimistic an assessment, and that instead “a patchwork of post-industrial first and fourth-world conditions is emerging against a second-world back

 So many discussions of inclusion and diversity seem to ignore class, so I appreciated this -  https://twitter.com/Anna_Colom/status/1327348323330764800 A great article by Tim Carmody covering two different ways people have written about pandemic risks/decisions: Maddow has constructed a universe where she is a tiny satellite orbiting a much larger planet, whose continued health and existence is the central focus of her concern. Manjoo has drawn a map with himself at its center, where anyone beyond the reach of his telephone falls off the edges. Maddow is also explicitly pleading with her viewers to learn what they can from her experience, and adjust their behavior accordingly. Manjoo is performing his calculus only for himself; he implicitly presents himself as a representative example (while also claiming he and his circle are extraordinarily conscientious and effective), but each reader can draw their own conclusions and make their own decision. At this point the balancing dominoes

The wonderful denizens of ClimateAction.Tech have collaborated on a new magazine , because: According to Nature, even before we pivoted to our screens so fully in 2020, uptake, information and communications systems accounted for two per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. The authors point to the music video for the hit song “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi feat. Daddy Yankee, which has five billion views on YouTube, and argue that to generate this kind of energy would take either 850,000 barrels of oil or 93 wind turbines running for an entire year. In the first quarter of 2020, Facebook reportedly removed 2.2 billion fake accounts, with each active profile estimated to account for 281 grams of CO2 – the same carbon footprint as a medium latte. And in 2019, the average user living in Europe scrolled the equivalent of 180 meters a day, exposing themselves on average to 1,700 carbon intensive – but ultimately ineffective – banner ads a month. Branch is about a sustainable internet for all;

Thanks Peter Bihr for picking out this from the Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson: The tragedy of the time horizon:     “Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. (…) What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few years ahead” The infrastructures we don't pay attention to:      https://twitter.com/seanmmcdonald/status/1315622673888743424 Eli Pariser on online public parks : Venture-backed platforms make poor quasi-public spa