As a fellow millennial academic I’ve done it before and think it’s fine. But I think the Thumbs Up emoji can usually carry the same meaning in work emails and is very safe.

The symposium will be 3-6 May 2026 in Iowa, USA, and the deadline for submissions is 19 December, 2025. Here's the flyer:

No worries about tangents, I’m a long winded professor myself. And your points about the genealogies of games is also important. I’m not saying that the three tracks were isolated, but all three grew out of separate spaces to eventually merge in the modern day.

Again, looking at the games in the ‘80s you see D&D-inspired strategy-focused games for PCs. Arcade games were borrowing from pinball & focused on coin-drop with fad-based games that would come and go. And video games were trying to bridge the gap between the two w/ inferior tech. to be affordable.

Even looking solely at the US, yes there was a “video game crash,” but the industries of arcade games and PC games in the US were barely affected. Pop. game history broadly needs to recognize non-US history and acknowledge that for the longest time PC/arcade/video games were all very different. 2/

I think it’s also important to get semantic about it too. There is a bit of push back amongst game historians to separate the three industries. While yes, we can call everything digital a “video game,” historically that term was tied directly to the unique technology of home consoles and CRT TVs 1/

I’m part of the newly launched game design program at Iowa State University: www.design.iastate.edu/academics/un...

I have no background in it, but I’ve noticed that blind spot as well. Lots of analysis of games as texts, or works of art, but not performance.

One of these days I’ll finish the planned trilogy, as well as revise the books. I wrote them in grad school, so paying for a copy editor was too expensive.

It is!

Guess I shouldn’t dress casually on campus