It's just two hours until The Killing Stone launches, and then I can go to sleep! Wait, I'm not sure that's how it was supposed to work. store.steampowered.com/app/2781470/...

Super satisfying to boot the game up on Steam Deck and see all my Xbox progress transfer over. I only just realised that after I made my video about Hitman I never stuck with it. Maybe stream it or something?

I love this team.

Fuck these people so fucking much. What a fucking waste of time.

The AI bubble RAM crisis is caused for non-existent problems by non-existent money for a non-existent infrastructure to meet non-existent demand to make non-existent business and will utterly destroy real business based on real demand and real infrastructure built with real money for real problems.

The mid-2000s led to a huge rise in things like Flash games, YouTubers, and anime, where you're fed smaller amounts of content on the regular. Millennials and older generations arguably have a different attitude towards media given the rate it was created and released was very different.

Game AI Uncovered volume 4 is out now, and I'm excited to say I contributed to see the series once again with a chapter on AI character design. So excited in fact, that until last week I forgot that my writing would appear in this volume! Looking forward to reading all the other chapters!

Huge congrats to @mackeza.bsky.social on the release of 'Super Nintendo'. Had this pre-ordered for months and very much looking forward to it.

If there's one part of my old academic life I've never successfully translated to my YouTube work it's this. Listening to me deliver online versus seeing it in action on stage are two very different things.

I've been ploughing through @jasonschreier.bsky.social's ‘Play Nice’ this past week. It's an excellent read, even if you have no real affinity for Blizzard. I was just thinking how I've played nearly all of Blizzard's releases from the past 30 years, but none have ever really stuck with me.

The Chappell Roan story is a fantastic example of how people value human artistry. We're sick and fed up of seeing AI slop fill social media feeds, so maybe invest some time and energy going the other route? I wouldn't know Roan's music if it bit me in the arse, but that trailer is dope!

Hey y'all. A South African dev released a blackity black game during BHM and it's currently getting the usual suspects in the reviews. Imma grab this up myself anyway, but can we all be some chums and help push the racists out of the reviews? 🙂

It's technically a lot easier to make AI clone the work of others in a digital realm than it is to build systems that replicate how we act in the real world. I mean have you seen self driving cars??? But he does raise a good point: I don't think I've ever seen any AI research on digging ditches.

The Oxford Video Game Preservation: Practices & Approaches talks are up on YT. Come hear me get on my little hills to die for! 🏔🎮 (𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘐 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘺𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘬, 𝘣𝘶𝘵 𝘮𝘢𝘺𝘣𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶'𝘳𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘵?) youtu.be/DPEbH7stxio?...

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

Nowadays I'm writing a lot about overhyped AI tools that will bring nothing of value to the games industry. So it was a real breath of fresh air to talk with the Snowcap team. *This* is the sort of smart, well-intentioned, and carefully designed AI tooling that helps developers make better games.

Sitting drinking coffee and smashing through several missions of Hyrule Warriors. This thought crops up in my head again...

Nowadays I'm writing a lot about overhyped AI tools that will bring nothing of value to the games industry. So it was a real breath of fresh air to talk with the Snowcap team. *This* is the sort of smart, well-intentioned, and carefully designed AI tooling that helps developers make better games.

One of those weeks were almost every story just annoyed me!

A small but deeply meaningful local project - digitising issues of 90s Scottish trans magazine The Tartan Skirt so all of us can access them. It's a really modest fundraising target with a significant outcome, please share or contribute if you can!

My former? Trans-ed.

Newsletter was a little later than planned this week given we were under embargo. I checked out a Bobium Brawlers: a new mobile game where you craft a deck of monsters for battle - but you design them using generative AI. The studio is keen to prove you can use Gen AI the right way for games.

Alright I'm on the train back to London now. So if you're itching to ask me something ranging from the serious to the benign now is the time!

On the train(s) to Manchester for @gamerepublic.bsky.social's '2026 Trends and Opportunities' event in Manchester. I'm hosting an AMA on the @aiandgames.com YouTube community tab while I'm traveling. Send in a question! youtube.com/post/Ugkx9cv...

After having to listen to Peter Kyle talk out his ass for a year about AI I was kinda hoping the new technology secretary might have a more practical and meaningful approach.

Kicking off my 2026 video output with something chill. I wanted to talk about how remarkably accessible Ragebound is given Ninja Gaiden is a notoriously challenging and difficult series to play. It's doing some small but simple things that help you define your own difficulty curve. It's neat!

Yeah so I might be giving a keynote on that there "AI disruption" at the Devcom leadership summit next month. Currently trying to balance between writing something scathing, anarchic and succinctly informative. Aye, it's an interesting balance to strike.

The Dynasty Warriors series has recently become my new guilty pleasure. But I'm really digging how Hyrule Warriors 2 and 3 are prequels and expansions on BotW and TotK's storylines. Also, Age of Imprisonment is the second game in recent memory where Zelda is the protagonist. Good stuff.

I've actually never been to this, but most of the talks Ive seen from it are great! If you are doing anything interesting PCGwise maybe see if you could submit something?

It's been a minute: OpenCAGE v0.15.0.0 is now live for Alien: Isolation, adding vast improvements to the script node editor, level viewer, and various asset handlers! More to come! store.steampowered.com/app/3367530/...

Properly loving Frontiers of Pandora. Mainly because I love Pandora *so much* as a destination and fully realised world. Being able to fly around and just explore is LUSh. Ps. It's free to play for a few days, if you're quick.

As requested by readers, I dig into the narratives presented by surveys on AI in games and how they often rely on obfuscation to push a narrative - for both pro and anti AI agendas. The truth can be found in reading between the lines, and figuring out the useful tidbits hiding in the data.

The saddest part of all this is that despite *everyone* knowing Meta's aspirations were doomed to fail, a whole bunch of devs got laid off despite their hard work to ship some of the best VR games that came to market. There are some absolute bangers on the Quest 3.

A cheeky trip up Paris with @arndreth.bsky.social and Matt for Electric Callboy. (Yeah I was too busy for the London gig so why not pop over the channel instead)

I've been playing Frontiers of Pandora and despite having no real interest in Avatar I'm pretty into it. It's Far Cry with survival and diet BotW-style exploration. It's a little rough round the edges but if you can vibe with it, it's great - especially after you unlock flying around on your ikran.

The big takeaways from my predictions issue for game devs are: - Indies who are gen AI free should fly that flag high, as Steam is going to filled with slop this year. - If you're a games studio with opinions on AI, unless you have done something people will actually like, just shut up.

Happy new year everyone. I made the smart move of staying largely offline during my holiday break, so here's a quick round-up of some of AI-related news stories that I drowned myself in on Monday!

Emerging from my vacation from the socials to say hey, it's almost time for the annual #DOOM run. I play through the original game from start to finish on stream. I'll be live on Tue 30th from 2pm UK time. www.youtube.com/live/kVKY5eW...

Sounds daft to say but I'm talking to a lot of people for whom YouTube is proving v difficult right now. If there's someone whose videos you like, boost them. Share their work around if you enjoy it. Support them on Patreon if you can. All helps a tremendous amount when the platform feels so hostile

Part 1 of the @aiandgames.com GOTY 2025 went live today. A nice mishmash of small indies, award darlings, and the big AAA releases of this year - plus a bunch of games that actually came out like two years ago.

Gonna be online playing through some Terminator 2D: No Fate, plus unboxing the collector's edition that has been sitting at my desk the past couple of days. Exciting stuff... youtube.com/live/HKLMrBH...

Well, throughly enjoyed Metroid Prime 4 until the last 5% of it. Didn't mind much of the broader design changes - some work, some don't and like every entry in the series it has it's own flavour. BUT... in classic series fashion the final boss is just infuriating and not fun. Consistency! 🤣

I briefly came out of vacation hibernation today for a press interview. We wound up talking about how much of a mess the AAA games industry is in right now that (generative) AI is seen by execs as the solution to the very problems it created for itself over the past 20-30 years.

My last video for the year was compiling all the footage from us behind-the-scenes at this years @conference.aiandgames.com. What an amazing couple of days with the brightest and best folk in Game AI - we focus only on the good stuff around here.

People deliberately conflating gen AI with NPC AI in games is just being a damned liar. I can understand people not getting the nuance between machine learning algorithms and LLMs, in part because that conflation is the fault of marketeers, but throwing NPC AI in there as well is deliberate.

If anything the nonsense AI hype has only increased the amount of work I'm doing. There's so many established and applied usages of AI in game development - including generative models - that don't compromise ethics or degrade product. And so our job is fighting to keep that message out there.

This is exactly the kind of poor reporting on AI in game dev that reinforces the problem For every person crying 'fuck AI' and the like you get these 'all games use AI' or 'it's just a tool' arguments. I mean I know there's no nuance on socials but journalism should be held to a higher standard.

At this point, if you are not disclosing that you used AI, you know that your audience doesn't want it

Been on holiday for like, a day, and the discourse on AI in gamedev is very loud. It's important to be angry, and be vocal but equally to be *informed*. Know what to be angry about, what discourse is recycled and how we use AI regularly in games. Shouting 'fuck AI in games' doesn't help.