Rob Gallagher
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gealga.bsky.social
Rob Gallagher
@gealga.bsky.social
240 followers 270 following 74 posts
Lecturer in Digital Media, King's College London. Co-director MA Digital Futures. Author of Videogames, Identity & Digital Subjectivity (Routledge 2017) and Artgames after Gamergate (Palgrave 2025): https://link.springer.com/book/9783032044341
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gealga.bsky.social
remember being very struck by what the participants in this @codingconduct.cc study had to say wrt when it feels justifiable to kick back & play games as a Responsible Adult
November 18, 2025 at 3:13 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Eve Sedgwick, 1997
Quotation from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reading 'Always historicize? What could have less to do with historicizing than the commanding, atemporal adverb ‘‘always’’?'
November 6, 2025 at 5:59 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Finally got around to watching Penda's Fen. Loose & baggy for sure, but an embarrassment of indelible shots & scenes, & absolutely wild that the Midlands had its reply to Twin Peaks ready 16 years early... archive.org/details/pend...
October 22, 2025 at 11:39 AM
gealga.bsky.social
In game studies we call this 'environmental storytelling'
A door with a sign saying "Attention: This room is out of use due to structural damage" stuck to it above a poster saying BUILD THE UNION. It leads to the dilapidated husk of what was once a university lecturer's office.
October 7, 2025 at 2:05 PM
gealga.bsky.social
neighbour on the street Whatsapp has a bag of homegrown watercress to give away & now I keep cracking myself up remembering how much of the 12th century epic of mad king Sweeney consists of him ardently pining for same
September 11, 2025 at 10:12 AM
gealga.bsky.social
hoping we might also get a chance to mention Slitterhead, Maken X and/or Shenmue II - still, to my knowledge, the only virtual HK to feature a rooftop canary vendor called Pet Shop Birdy Birds, run by a manic pixie Red Hot Chilli Peppers fan
Screenshot of Shenmue II Shenmue II NPC wearing a shirt with the letters RHCPs on it
August 28, 2025 at 2:52 PM
gealga.bsky.social
literally ordered this from the library yesterday on the basis of Hervé Guibert's blazingly OTT declaration of his hate/love for Bernhard lol....
August 20, 2025 at 9:25 AM
gealga.bsky.social
My new book has a cover! Much gratitude to Tabitha Nikolai for letting me use a shot from her peerless dysphoric suburban hikikomori simulator Shrine Maidens of the Unseelie Court 🙏
The cover of the academic monograph Artgames after Gamergate by Rob Gallagher.
August 20, 2025 at 8:54 AM
gealga.bsky.social
My copy of this arrived! Shout to editors @profmatthew.bsky.social & Steffi Shook, & drop me a line if you'd like to read my chapter on how videogames model & represent sexual reproduction, heredity & evolution...
A copy of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Sex and Sexuality in Game Studies A Question of Breeding: Reproduction, Evolution and Heredity in Video Games
August 19, 2025 at 3:50 PM
gealga.bsky.social
💗
August 18, 2025 at 10:41 AM
gealga.bsky.social
the trilogy gets more airtime, but I read these last year & thought Forgetting Elena was particularly great - arch & cryptic, lots of rich textures & cattily fraught interpersonal dynamics & pageantry. RIP!
June 4, 2025 at 2:47 PM
gealga.bsky.social
a couple of personal faves, half a century apart: the ball bearing baseball game in Laura (Preminger, 1944) & the cute Lethal Enforcers (Konami, 1992) cameo in A Confucian Confusion (Yang, 1994)
May 22, 2025 at 9:04 AM
gealga.bsky.social
Phenomenologist Jan-Hendrik Bakels becomes Tetris
A passage from an academic article that reads "And for some reason, the longer I play the game I kind of lose the capacity for feeling the spatial extent of my own body, instead feeling it (not actually, but gradually) replaced by sensing the continuous impact of little objects hitting the ground—like a rocky, material rain—rather inside than outside of me. After a long session of Tetris, the session’s aftermath is characterized by almost feeling like I am the vessel in which I had to arrange these little rocks, still feeling the continuous rhythm of countless impacts. But how can we account for these experiences on a theoretical level?"
March 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Game developer Florencia Rumpel Rodriguez discovers i) that other countries have parental ratings systems for games & ii) Meryl Silverburgh's 'pixelated... ass'
A passage from a zine that reads "I only found out that in other countries videogames had parental ratings similar to those of movies because foreign videogame magazines printed the ratings for the games, and explained what they stood for. Those foreign videogame magazines were in my house, because from the playstation era onwards, my father lost his ability to figure out how to progress on a videogame on his own. He would buy this magazines that were printed in Spain, and play the games while I read the magazines and told him what he should be doing next. I remember playing Metal Gear Solid with my father in this way. After telling him that maybe we shouldn't hurry up too much, because we would see Merryl without pants if we did, he said it was okay and did it anyways. This is how kid me saw her first pixelated piece of ass."
March 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Poet Oli Hazzard empties his bladder after a five hour Fifa binge
passage that from a book that reads "my skin was pale and I felt like basic sensory phenomena— the cold of the toilet seat against the tips of my fingers, the sensation of piss struggling through my urethra down my penis and out of the too-small slit at the end (when I piss in such states I sometimes think of my penis as screaming or being sick, and am not unmoved), the low note of non-communicative noise I emit as this pro- cess occurs, which is expressive of neither pleasure nor displeasure but is simply a noise of release -- have to travel through an additional layer of accreted sediment in order to reach that part of my interior that is alerted to their happening, and I feel like I am emerging from something distinct from sleep or distraction, a state of having been away from language for a while, and returning from the place where I had been—a place in which I 'thought' in football..."
March 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Novelist Nicholson Baker gets to grips with the Xbox 360 controller
Passage of text that goes "In order to run, crouch, aim, fire, pause, leap, speak, stab, grab, kick, dismember, unlock, crawl, climb, parry, roll, or resuscitate a fallen comrade, you must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons, singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing “Blue Rondo à la Turk” on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet."
March 28, 2025 at 3:04 PM
gealga.bsky.social
The cover of Godspeed You Black Emperor's F# A# ∞
March 10, 2025 at 5:42 PM
gealga.bsky.social
...it really does look splendid too, speaking as a fan of crisply textured low poly models & flamboyant character portraits (& gets bonus points for being set in London)
March 6, 2025 at 10:57 AM
gealga.bsky.social
TW18
A photograph of a suburban building in a state of dilapidation and desuetude, with the legend FEAR BRO etched above the doorway in serifed capitals
February 21, 2025 at 2:36 PM
gealga.bsky.social
tho one of the biggest early ASMR bloggers liked to reminisce about spending his South African childhood zoning out to the sound of an elderly Xhosa man who had been maimed in an industrial accident trimming the foliage by their pool, so it's not like we're in unprecedented territory here 🤷
screenshot of article text reading "an aged African, Xhosa speaking man ... who came around to do the gardening on Saturdays. There was a tragic tale behind this man: he’d lost all of his fingers on one hand in an accident years before involving a large industrial fan or something ... . These were the last dying days of apartheid, and the beginning of democracy in South Africa, and before I even knew what racism was. He was a good friend of mine. Young, and naive – those were good days... I remember one particular activity, and that was when he would trim the hedges around the pool, and he would also whistle while he did it ...sitting in the sun, listening to the trimming noises of the hedge clippers and the soft whistles made for some of the most intense AIE experiences I can remember ..."
February 19, 2025 at 2:57 PM
gealga.bsky.social
DID YOU KNOW that the founder of 8chan got his first taste of anon culture when 4chan raided Sonic Adventure 2's Chao Kindergarten BBS, a place for swapping tips on breeding, raising & racing rare variants of adorably vacant, droplet-headed virtual pets?
Screenshot of the videogame Sonic Adventure 2, showing small creatures playing in a verdant tropical garden
February 7, 2025 at 12:08 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Just incredible levels of inopportunity here...
January 28, 2025 at 6:45 PM
gealga.bsky.social
maiden Field Work mix of 2025 is up to salve those early January/late modernity blues. Some frosty drones & esoterick canticula, plus a breezily limber Letta Mbulu number www.nts.live/shows/fieldw...
January 8, 2025 at 2:07 PM
gealga.bsky.social
new credo just dropped
December 13, 2024 at 5:33 PM
gealga.bsky.social
Somehow only now learning, in late, late 2024, that Sheryl Sandberg & Bobby Kotick used to be an item?
December 9, 2024 at 6:19 PM