Epigram #0 – Boo (2025)
Abstract: You've got ghosts in you now.
Cite as: Bartleby, ?. (2025). Boo. Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 0). Haunted Playground Press.
Epigram #1 – The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places (2025)
Abstract: Psychogeography—the study of how environments shape emotion and behaviour—has long concerned itself with the emotional resonance of the physical, often through the idea of the dérive through the city. Its philosophical core, however, is primarily concerned with identifying affective relationships between the personal and the environmental, and this does not require the constraint of concrete.
This paper extends psychogeographical practice into the realm of the imaginary, proposing a psychogeography of virtual and fictive spaces. Drawing on literary, Situationist, and contemporary psychogeographical traditions, we examine how the dérive might operate within the elastic spatiality and temporalities of video game worlds. We argue that digital environments, being wholly constructed, invite new forms of meaning-making and self-reflection. Through this reframing, games become both laboratory and landscape for a revitalised psychogeography: one attuned not only to the spirits of streets and cities, but also to the ghosts that haunt code, pixels, and play.
Cite as: Heron, M., Belford, P., and Aune, K. (2025). The Psychogeography of Imaginary Places. Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 1). Haunted Playground Press.
`Epigram #2 – Paddling in the Shadows (2025)
Abstract: Academic publication often does not treat popular culture as an equal partner when it comes to setting the parameters of research work. More than anything else, academic inquiry into popular culture outside of specialist gaming venues is defined by a lack of appropriate context setting. The result is that irrelevant cultural touchstones receive undue prominence with the concomitant negative impact on broader relevance to the community. Examples include boardgame papers that never stray from Ludo, Monopoly, Catan and Scrabble and video game projects that act as if the past two decades of game development didn't happen. The costs to our discipline are considerable, particularly when it comes to the reputation of academia as a first-order source of insight and commentary into popular culture - our own work may draw from the best of what contemporary gaming culture has to offer, but it is in other fields that games are most commonly encountered within research. In this paper we outline this problem with reference to the guiding philosophy ‘nothing about us without us’ and provide some actionable suggestions for how we can do better going forward.
Cite as: Heron, M., and Crabb, M. (2025). Paddling in the Shadows: A Manifesto for Doing Better Research with Games. Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 2). Haunted Playground Press.
`Epigram #3 – Institutional Quixotism (2025)
Abstract: Institutional Quixotism advances a philosophy of academic life grounded in custodianship and ethical resistance. Drawing inspiration from Don Quixote not as a parable of delusion but as an ethic of principled idealism, this paper argues that universities are not possessions to be managed but legacies to be tended.It proposes an aspirational code of conduct oriented toward stewardship, collegial self-governance, solidarity, and humane scholarship.
The work outlines a mode of academic practice that prioritises meaning over metrics, kindness over compliance, and duty over ambition. It frames quixotism not as a grand gesture but as a pattern of small, deliberate acts: defending imaginative spaces, naming harm where it occurs, absorbing institutional pressures that would otherwise fall on the vulnerable, and sustaining a commitment to the unfinished, the speculative, and the transgressive. It embraces the inevitability of failure not as justification for disengagement but as evidence of the necessity of continuing the fight—however unwinnable, however exhausting-for the kind of academic life in which we can still recognise ourselves when we look in the mirror.
Cite as: Heron, M. (2025). Institutional Quixotism: An Ethic of Responsible Custodianship in Irresponsible Times. Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 3). Haunted Playground Press.
`Epigram #4 – Ghosts of Possibility (2025)
Abstract: Within popular gaming discourse, the term ‘backlog’ names a familiar anxiety: the ever-growing list of unplayed games that trails behind many players like a guilty shadow. For most, this is a trivial irritation. For some—especially those working within game studies—it becomes an affective burden, a quiet sense of professional insufficiency, or a foreclosure of possibility. The backlog is less a list than an unrealised imaginary: a catalogue of futures that might have been, titles that promise insight, pleasure, or literacy but remain forever deferred.
Academic writing rarely lingers on this phenomenon, and what discussion exists is largely informal. Drawing on autoethnographic practice, this paper examines how obligation, professional identity, curiosity, and the fear of missing out shape our relationships with media we own but have not yet encountered.
This work does not claim universality. Instead, it aims to make visible a largely unarticulated aspect of gamer and academic experience: the way unplayed media can haunt us, pressure us, or quietly shape our sense of competence and belonging.
Cite as: Heron, M. (2025). Ghosts of Possibility: The Steam Backlog as an Unrealised Imaginary. Haunted Playground Epigrams (No. 4). Haunted Playground Press.
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