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...