I've laughed waaaaaay more at this than I should have.

Although Lorelei and the Laser Eyes can drag in places, I still really admire the game for its craft of integrating the story with the puzzles. Frequent references to key events, confusions between fiction/realities, character building in the puzzles etc. A lot of tricks that deserve studying.

Be Gay. Do Crime. Hit Kids.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes does a neat thing where the years of events are codes for ~50% the puzzles, so the puzzle part is figuring out how the same code is represented this time. And the repetition of number also slowly points your curiosity to what events those numbers refer to.

Really enjoy this podcast on @acidhorizon.bsky.social Digital theory has some presence in game studies but I never paid much attention but this new essay collection feels like a good entry. youtu.be/xIDlnjzFYwM

I'm still in the tutorial sequence but the way that it deeply explores the thematic and narrative implications of the mechanics is imo incredibly inspired

A game design for evoking reflection is to draw attention to the constructed nature of the game goal: Romero's Train, and Consume Me, Rhythm Doctor do it in narrative beats But I'm always surprised how often those moments and thus themes are missed that are often so evident to critics and academics

It's a crime that folks aren't more aware Pathologic 3 is coming out in <10 hours

Finished Consume Me. Really enjoy the presentation, the sheer ambition and love behind it. Clever narrative touches through Florence-esque interactions and cultural critiques thru game logic. But at the same time I feel that its system is a bit overdesigned for its larger thematic goal (cont...)

I enjoy the latest Wong Kar-Wai for the business drama (surprisingly) and that it is mostly in Shanghainese, contrasting China's past of Mandarin standadization But the article is correct, Wong's style feels substanceless in the show, almost tangential to the script compared to the classics

Recommend the whole blog post, but there's a chess analogy in there that's interesting (obligatory @spizelo.bsky.social), where a specific game chess, rather than games like D&D, are used as models for scientific knowledge (I suggest D&D because it defines game rules very differently).

In normal academic writing, we use brief discussions of games to help us make a point. Writing a whole book about ACNH instead gave me an opportunity to explore complex, ambivalent experiences with the game — some of which I recently got to talk about with Emily Cerf news.ucsc.edu/2025/12/anim...

😶‍🌫️ Remecarving: or, Forgettings a collection of 829 computational poems, each depicting the gradual algorithmic *forgetting* of a sentence found in Wikipedia that exhorts the reader to remember last-minute entry for NaNoGenMo 2025! github.com/NaNoGenMo/20...

EXCLUSIVE: So far it's been unclear what proof Rockstar Games has to justify its firing of 34 union members, who it claims were leaking "confidential information in a public forum". PMG has now seen some of the messages which contributed to this decision being made. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TvW...

Haven't read the paper yet but in my experience LLM is just terrible at picking up what makes writers actually proud of their work like proses, themes and very tailored moments of obfuscation and reveal. Glad there's a study on it now!

A sneak peek at the cover of next week’s issue, which celebrates Zohran Mamdani’s historic win. #NewYorkerCovers https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/451hFM

Rather beautifully, Professor Mahmood Mamdani's dedication in "Neither Settler Nor Native" is to his trail-blazing son, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social. He quotes the revolutionary Chinese writer Lu Xun's famous concluding lines in "Hometown": 「其實地上本沒有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。」 -魯迅，故鄉 #everynightapoem

It's a good time to write a book about a single game/series! There's the great work being published by @bossfightbooks.com And now three of the best scholarly presses have joined in ...

I've been teaching and mentoring beginning game makers for a while. One thing I noitced is that they very often try to introduce variety by making completely different (mini)games. It feels like a really surface level understanding of variety

I ordered a "big spicy" at a malatang place in Flushing. The person apologied as she handed me the bowl with mostly redness on top of it.

In light of all discussions of AI use in education, people don't talk often enough about hybrid cases, where some efforts were involved but there's things like hallucination that points to AI use. There's a lost of trust but at the same time treating it as plagiarism doesn't feel quite right.

I'm a Battlefield fanboy. Not sure how many could connect with my observation here but it's very interesting to see the mixed reactions for Battlefield 6 coming from supposed "fans" and "veterans". It is like a "communal" feeling that can only define itself thru oppositions.

My first experience with the NYPD is that it took 3 visits where each time there's new rules that we didn't meet to file a police report. The very last time the officer looked at 2 documents for minutes and then came up with a reason that doesn't even follow the state law.

"this does not look like a game from 10 years ago" just doesn't make sense anymore in the age of marginal graphical improvement. Almost every game from 10 years ago "does not look like a game from 10 years ago"

Murders on the Yangtze River is a really well-made ACE Attorney-like. I'm mostly fascinated by the historicity of the plot. The colonial theme slowly reveals itself across all the murder mysteries and the drama of the court (e.g. they had a pair of British and Chinese judges during court hearings)

I was today years young when I learned that Butlerian Jihad was a Dune term, not a fun word for queer revolution.

I'm so thankful that Roottrees are Dead uses MSAA, sick and tired of seeing TAA and DLSS everywhere and sometimes they look downright ugly

The Witness is one of the most influential games for developing my taste in games. And seeing JBlow's politics was obviously pretty disappointing. And Reddit is trying to find whether we could've seen his turn in the game, which is a fascinating discussion to me.

Just a quick reminder that when Miyazaki said that AI-created animation was "an insult to life itself" he was speaking not just about humans abdicating the act of creation, but also of the moral obscenity that flows from the work of a robotic "creator" with no understanding of human dignity or pain.

As I keep writing for my dissertation game, it really struck me how powerful dialogue choice is as an expressive form I love creating contrast between options. It makes you imagine what could've been, and whatever happens afterwards can respond to that contrast to communicate a message

Dead Letter Dept is an amazing low-poly+analog horror game. Although it made me think about endings, I ended up reading on the good ending because it's very missable and I dread playing it again. Part of me wishes that the choices were presented more directly...

things I need to watch immediately

ANNOUNCEMENT! my game is releasing on Monday! "Telegrams from the Choir Train" is an experimental narrative game about managing freight through a telegraph wired to frail binary Gods. It is played entirely inside YOUR DISCORD SERVER Releasing Monday January 20th! bjeck.github.io/CRC-RITU/ind...

Watching this Nvidia conference just makes me imagine how 30 years from now people are gonna write "deep history" or "platform studies" to imagine how computer graphics could've turned out differently

omg a student somehow accidentally wrote an email addressed to a faculty-wide NYU listserv and my inbox is now a master class on who understands the difference between a listserv and an email chain

Really excited that my paper is out!! It went through many rewrites and I hope that my framing around agency is helpful to folks!

There's something about being too much of a gamer where you become very illterate to process dialogues. I missed so much of Mouthwashing's initial setup and key (Anya's) plot points that I honestly felt embrassed for how much I didn't understand what was going on.