iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Proud (co-)supervisor time! Last Friday, Ana Laura Matos Torquato successfully defended her PhD at the a Universidade Federal de Goiás (Brazil). Her PhD touches on horror, the metaludic and subjectivity, and centred on making an adventure game about the migrant experience of urban space.

Screengrab from a Teams meeting for Ana Laura Matos Torquato's PhD defense, moments after the committee announced their decision to award the PhD.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

Unprecedented heatwaves are cooking us to death in our homes, the ecosystems we depend on are collapsing, and our planet is becoming unliveable, but that's a small price to pay to have the computer tell me I'm a special little baby.

Politico.eu headline from June 17 2026 saying "Europe must choose between AI and climate goals, data center lobby says"

Headline from the Guardian from June 22 2026 saying "Europe suffers under record heatwave as temperatures forecast to reach 44C"

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

Each essay takes an in-game item as its starting point. My own contribution reads the Darksign in DS1 in the tradition of the Mark of Cain & other tropes of the wanderer and the exile in Romanticism(see also: Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Wordsworth's 'I wandered lonely as a cloud').

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

Just received physical copies of our volume of essays on the games of From Software, out now on @tuneandfairweather.bsky.social - and it's an even more gorgeous thing than photos can convey. I was planning on doing some work today but might just stare at this on the shelf instead.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

I love Maria Kato's beautiful artwork, packing each card with observational details of life in Niseko. And did I mention you can bid with potatoes?

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Last 3 hours to back Yotei from @mightyboards.bsky.social! This is a special one, an absolutely delightful game with a real home-grown, hyper-local sense of place by a team from Niseko, Hokkaido, right down to components crafted by hand out of Niseko wood. www.kickstarter.com/projects/mig...

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

And then there were the times when, instead, Perugia felt like being in an @alariko.bsky.social artwork.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 05/05/2026

Also, I visited Perugia for the defense, and I've never been to a place that feels more like being in a Piranesi etching or a From Software architectural fantasia. Layers upon layers of architecture, centuries piled on top of each other.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 04/05/2026

It's not every day you see your first co-supervised PhD student defend his dissertation! Daniele Monaco traces the notion of the genius loci in Western culture and philosophy of space, and applies it as a framework for thinking about our engagement with space and place in digital game worlds.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

It's obvious, we're lethalitymaxxing. Get with the program!

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 03/03/2026

*taps the sign with increasing weariness*

Text from a 1979 IBM internal training manual that says "A computer can never be held accountable. Therefore a computer must never make a management decision."

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 02/03/2026

Sure Europe might have had some reservations about the US with the whole Greenland thing, but there's nothing like some good old-fashioned imperialism in the Middle East to bring old friends together.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

I do! My novel is out on UK-based Praspar Press later this year. I'll share their words on it, which feels slightly less self-aggrandizing than trying to talk it up myself.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

The gorgeous soundstage landscapes of The Jade Raksha (Ho Meng-Hua, 1968)

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

I don't willingly use AI for anything, but the fact that every app insists on shoving it into my face means I keep seeing things like this which remind me why I don't willingly use AI for anything.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

Last month The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Games, ed. by @add-hawk.bsky.social & John Richard Sageng, was also out! I've got a chapter on the idea of 'beauty' in the aesthetic philosophy of Kant & Schiller and how it applies to play & games, and it's in great company in this huge collection.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I also wrote a piece in the issue about ruins in occupied Palestine - from post-1948 attempts to erase the ruins memorialising centuries of Palestinian presence, to post-2023 (ab)use of images of the ruins of Gaza to foreground, rather than obscure, the violence and cruelty of the Zionist project.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

I haven't been great at sharing my recent work on here. Time to fix that! First up: with Mathias Fuchs, I co-edited a special issue of Digital Culture & Society on Ruins and the Contemporary, exploring images and imaginaries of ruin in contemporary culture. www.degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/...

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

I look forward to this every year, and I finally found time to watch this! Look what you made me do (complimentary)

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 14/11/2025

Only Important Serious Cinema this week.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

As always it was a pleasure to be at Essen Spiel with @mightyboards.bsky.social! Got to show off our new Fateforge expansion, caught up with friends, made new ones, played some excellent new games (special shout out to the Yōtei team, who made one of the most delightful games I've played in a while)

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

Just some of the game libraries mentioned in the article: Fire Emblem: Three Houses // Elden Ring // Mutazione // Alone in the Dark

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

The new issue of Countertext includes a paper by Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone and myself on libraries in digital games - their significances, (non-)functions, meanings. It's not open-access (boo), but ask and you shall receive www.euppublishing.com/toc/count/11/2

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan is awarded Adventure Game of the Year at the Polish Board Game of the Year awards! It's beyond amazing to see Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaan continue to get recognition, especially right as we've wrapped up work on the second expansion.

A graphic of the three board games receiving an Adventure Game of the Year award from the Polish Board Game Awards, showing Fateforge as the winner and Thorgal and Tamashi as runners-up.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

At #historyofgames2025, where the focus is the 1990s! My own 90s in gaming involved playing NES game knockoffs on my cousin's Micro Genius, getting my first PC, and, as a 13-year-old, buying pirated PC games from a police officer running a side business from the trunk of a squad car. Ah, nostalgia.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 16/07/2025

The future dystopian Rome of Lucio Fulci's Warriors of the Year 2072 (1984). My paper on the film's use of the gladiatorial combat trope has just been published in @gua-le-ni.com @domford.bsky.social and Riccardo Fassone's special issue of Eludamos on fictional games. eludamos.org/index.php/el...

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

520+ participants from 42 countries, 326 paper & abstract presentations, 16 workshops, a PhD consortium, a public discussion, conference dinner, board game night, improv show, and a beach visit. I think we can safely say that #DiGRA25 organized by @indigitalgames.bsky.social was a big success!

A picture of a panel discussion during DiGRA 2025, with (left to right) Omar N'Shea, Rasheed Abueideh, Aphra Kerr, Yuqian Sun, Daniel Vella, and Krista Bonello Rutter Giappone.

A picture of the opening address of DiGRA 2025, with (left to right) Simon Fabri, Stefano Gualeni, Daniel Vella, and Ashley Guajardo

A picture of Rasheed Abueideh's keynote presentation at the University of Malta Valletta Campus for DiGRA 2025.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 21/06/2025

Presenting at Film-Philosophy 2025 next week and working on a thing.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

A meta moment? From a soon-to-be-published paper on libraries in videogames.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 16/06/2025

Mark your calendars! 30/06 18.30 CET, as part of DiGRA 2025 at the University of Malta, I'm thrilled to be co-chairing Games at the Crossroads - a public discussion with a great lineup of speakers! Livestreamed on Zoom, free attendance - just sign up to receive the link: forms.gle/jmwCWyLQtof5...

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

I'm at Nord University in Bodø, Norway for the already excellent Northern Star Symposium, organized by @torillelvira.bsky.social and others. Getting into the building was a challenge but we finally made it with some summoned help.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

Was lucky enough to catch one day of Off Camera Festival in Krakow: Sister Midnight is a standout and I can't see it not being one of my films of 2025.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Björk - Vulnicura, 22 years after solo debut

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

It's a sunny day in Kraków, perfect to sit with some lovely pu'er tea and @gua-le-ni.com's new dystopian detective novel.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Military dictatorships, outlaw couples, genetically engineered flower kaijus, and postcolonial perspectives: one of those all-over-the-place weeks, I guess.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

All hail the Anderson-Jovovich ascendancy.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

To check if any of my published work has been used to train Meta AI, I had to make an exception to my boycott of the publication that had published articles saying it was legally okay for Israel to kill children. Everything is compromised.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Graduation day, a yearly reminder that I love my job because not only do we have amazing students but also where else would I be able to hand out university degrees that have this written on them @indigitalgames.bsky.social

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

At the risk of sounding like a "Roman Empire guy" (oh God), it's been a month since I visited the buried chambers of Nero's Domus Aurea in Rome, and it's still marked in my mind. Layers of time, endurance and decay, the transcendence of beauty inseparable from the oppressive tyranny of wealth.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 09/03/2025

This week's film with the Games & Narrative class was Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist (2024), and again it was thrilling to see students react to and engage with something formally and structurally experimental, meditatively paced, and thematically elusive.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

What's the running theme here? I don't know! But was it a good week? Yes! #letterboxdfriday #LastFourWatched

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

Watched The Last Laugh (1924), one of the greatest of all silent films, with my Games and Narrative class. Some trepidation re what Gen Z game kids would make of a 101-year-old film, but they loved it & wanted to sit and talk about it for a full hour afterwards.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

I mean, just look at these amazing minis for the new animal companions in the second Fateforge expansion. Having a great time designing and writing the narrative around these little critters. The Kickstarter is still on for a few more days! @mightyboards.bsky.social

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

The whole idea of 'balanced reporting' was a mistake.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

And here's another: Bubble Bubble Toil and Trouble, which casts you as a bubble of miasma spewed from a witch's cauldron with the aim of infecting an entire village.

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Daniel Vella @danielvella.bsky.social · 27/01/2025

The Malta @globalgamejam.bsky.social hosted at @indigitalgames.bsky.social this weekend went super well! Proud of the games our students made. Here's one: Sorry to Burst Your Bubble, a Twine game about navigating social anxiety while trying to get out of an interminable conversation.

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