iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

obviously nobody will ever dethrone the puritanical "you can't jump over piranha plants" gen xers, but I really wonder how social mores around cheating and deviance will change in the near future

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 20h

its this weird double maneuver where we've borrowed the legitimacy obsession of sports for a certain slice of competitive gaming but also every content creator is running mods for everything else. hell in games where ugc is the game its arguably just one big mod.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 20h

cheat devices (and cheat codes in general) have no reason to exist in a playculture that has fully absorbed modding culture and/or pivoted to online forevergames where player activity is highly policed

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 20h

quite enjoying the consalvo book so far but god, the chapter on cheat devices really gave me feelings of "the world you grew up in no longer exists"

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Cheating isn't a very densely theoretical book but something I've noted is that game studies tends to talk about paratexts plural and Consalvo talks about the paratext singular. they are less moons orbiting the text for her and more the universe in which the text is situated.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

like ultimately she is absolutely correct but the idea that within a few years we will all have computers with streaming video in our pockets was unthinkable.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

really funny called shot in chapter 2 of Cheating. Consalvo is skeptical of the industry claim that digital game guides won't overtake print due to inconvenience, but her rationale is that a player could simply rig up a dvd player and console to a tv and switch between feeds.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

yeah i really think this is a victim of (sub)titling. should really be called something like "cheating: gaming capital and the paratextual industry". get those key terms in there.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

hard not to look at the google scholar stats for The Other Big MIT Press Games Book From 2007 and feel like we live in the darker timeline

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

the latest computer lab highjinks video (great channel btw) got me to finally pick up consalvo's cheating and while it's by no means an under-cited book i am just like, what the hell? you could do cultural game studies in 2007? that was allowed?

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

"i'd rather play the game the old fashioned way" yeah man i should hope you wouldn't manipulate rng to get perfect items and clip up thru the track when playing mk64 with your buddies🙄

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

content farms back on the "present tas footage with no explanation of what it is to rile up normies" beat

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

any time i see a "top [whatever] of [whenever]" list i think of a kid making a "Top 100 cool rocks I found at the beach" list. doesn't mean cool rocks don't exist but that the exercise itself is a little pointless.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

then again, i guess you could use ACE to patch in the needed vector math lol

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

even though it seems intuitive to label as a bug, if it's not part of the game then it belongs to some other conceptual category. it would be like saying it's a bug that you can't use your sword to kill npc's or something.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

we can't just revert to intentionality, but the only other alternative seems like an appeal to the physical world. and as skawo points out when epona is jumping the laws of physics don't apply, it's literally just playing a keyed jump animation! so idk

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

in my thinking i just sort of assumed that the non-presuppositional casts a wider net than the non-intentional. but this example kinda feels like something that is not intentional (the inability to jump over low walls while going down a slope) is at least somewhat presupposed, since the check exists

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

great vid from skawo as always. but the comment that the minimum wall height check is a bug got me thinking. is it really a bug if something isn't possible in a game that "should" be? www.youtube.com/watch?v=OM-2...

youtube.com

Why Are Epona's Jumps in Ocarina of Time So Finicky?

YouTube video by Skawo

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Reposted by rh♦mbical

rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

money's a bit tight so I'm plugging this again: 50 essays for 5 bucks. 40% off if you subscribe to patreon.com/rhombical at 2nd tier. rhombical.itch.io/totally-rhom...

rhombical.itch.io

Totally Rhombical by rh♦mbical

The Collected Essays of Davy R. Howard

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

money's a bit tight so I'm plugging this again: 50 essays for 5 bucks. 40% off if you subscribe to patreon.com/rhombical at 2nd tier. rhombical.itch.io/totally-rhom...

rhombical.itch.io

Totally Rhombical by rh♦mbical

The Collected Essays of Davy R. Howard

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

weirdly immersion goes in the quadrant with mechanics even though it's part of the definition for flow

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

1) dear god 2) if you wanna play a real meme game visit rhombical.itch.io/ms3 it's no fuck's quest 2 but i think it's p solid

rhombical.itch.io

Mr. Slug 3: Slimin' Quest by rh♦mbical

An imprecision platformer built for speedrunning

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

reached 666 hours on my practice file 😈

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

anyways i'm not gonna be the one to do it but someone should really write about 1) how game avatars and porn actors are both understood in terms of a unidirectional identification 2) how transness and "ludonarrative" are both understood in terms of dissonances and harmonies

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

like nintendo didn't have to put that stuff about birdo or samus in the manuals (what even is the average players' access to those in the video rental era?) but the minute you have Bodies in a videogame and not just A Paddle you get games about how unstable the gender binary is!

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

its been an interesting exercise to read the provenzo & kinder books to see how nintendo games were understood broadly by adults in the 90s (as power fantasies for boys), and then to follow that up with the "in play" chapters that rejoin with "ok but like, what's with all the gender weirdness then?"

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

which was obviously very attractive to me at the time but almost a decade removed i don't think the field puts its full weight into the argument of that book the way i do. i feel like it gets pigeonholed as a book about "player practices" or something.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

false dichotomy obviously but i was definitely trained by folks that favoured the latter path. then maybe metagaming is like the third way of rebooting game studies from first principles.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

feels like if you're a grad student in the mid 2010s the two paths to a future critical game studies are games of empire's "theory is back, baby!" or critical play's "eh we can roll with the play theory we have but let's do it in a feminist way".

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

been reading select chapters from the palgrave "in play" series. it's interesting to see how the temperature in the room was changing post-2016, when i was in undergrad and largely unaware of the state of the field. shaw's book is out at that point but people mostly just seem fed up.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

also nausea is so weird bc this didn't make me feel sick at all

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

me for years: first person perspective isn't inherently more immersive and 360 video is a gimmick me after watching this: well now i don't know cause that was cool as fuck www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er6o...

youtube.com

SM64 1 Key TAS But You Can Look Around Wherever You Want

YouTube video by UncommentatedPannen

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

fwiw i also really dug the mega man x chapter because its the exact sort of game that would be invisible to most game studies

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

game studies gave games culture a hammer and is thrilled that the gamers have reported that everything is nail-shaped

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

its always a little jarring to me how much some folks are still fully on board with immersion and flow in 2026, with 0 qualifications

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

i've never been led astray by actually Reading the Thing before, but sometimes there is also a virtue to the laziness of intuition

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

me 2 years ago reading menkman: this seems like a punctum-style argument me 2 hours ago finishing camera lucida: not only that, barthes is literally using the term domestication!!

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

nothing against fannishness and putting that into your writing but when I was in a panel recently and someone in the audience went "oh I am also using [theorist] to analyze [AAA action game]" I was kinda like, idk if this is my thing anymore...

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

i know that people are out there doing work on roblox, but the primary concern there seems to be Are Children Safe? (which is y'know, an important question) and not Is This Good Art?

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

you see the observation made that game studies in the late 00s was just WoW and GTA studies, and then the millennials came in and the scholarship got Good. and maybe that's true but in 2026 the mass cultural playforms (roblox etc.) look a lot more like WoW than they do bioshock or whatever.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

it's this weird playculture we find ourselves in where campaign-based game design is becoming a dying art but also we have infinite access to this art as its dying.

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

a 3d platformer for android from 2017 is popping off on src. on the one hand, it gives me some glimmer of hope that the MS3 record will be improved one day. on the other it's like, is this how new speedgame communities form now? just the random chaos of being blessed by the algorithm a decade later?

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

gonna take a break in the fall but will have some holdover patreon-exclusives so now is a good time to join!

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rh♦mbical @rhombical.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

also, i need academics to understand: speedrunners DO engage with the contents of a videogame. they can't NOT do that. they are not neo from the matrix.

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