never in my life did I think I'd be working on a videogame phd project that called upon my teenage knowledge of the most terrible DVD I ever owned (and watched over 20 times...)

Strolled around the highly literary campus of St. John's College yesterday, very tickled by how the Shakespearean naming conventions of some buildings led to the text on this fire department connection sign

"The moment you put the controller down, your licence to use it will be revoked and you will need to purchase a new one" said Sony chaser.com.au/entertainmen...

look at what graduate school did to my boy

I was delighted to present Multiplayer Bitsy at Narrascope last weekend! Talk recording is now up (33min + Q&A): youtu.be/SrGtvHe8DNs?...

The folks at @narrascope.org very kindly uploaded talks from last week's excellent conference to YouTube -- here's mine, where I meander through my bitsy piece in @gamepoems.bsky.social, citational modernist poetry, intertextual game materials, and a bit more www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzR7...

warming up my brain most mornings by incrementally fiddling with a little GB Studio driving game. I'm also trying out working with another person's asset pack for the first time, I really fell in love with piiixl's 1-bit designs: piiixl.itch.io

Every time Itch goes down, this is what I think of

it truly is a great campus if you're a fan of Zones

pretty obsessed with how @narrascope.org is located in an unused Dreamcast render (the UAlbany campus)

what color is that word how long is that ping loop how baggy is that guys shirt how many frames is that volume active how tall is that block how bright is that hallway where does that pipe go does the heart go on the left or the right is it hp or health or how many of this resource is that

So, in much of academia we have this idea we need to wag our fingers at our students based on our assumptions about their motivations and values. But what if we didn’t do that? What if that’s more destructive?

Ok, let me state one step more formally my problem with AI code. You cannot trust it to be more expert than you because you cannot check and verify what it created. It's beyond you. You cannot be responsible for it, nor can the AI. It can ONLY be used as a toy or subset of your abilities.

please read my new webcomic: My Aloof Girlfriend Is A Slot Machine..... And She Just Called Me A Pay Pig?????

I'm not saying it's a conspiracy that companies are exerting major resources to normalize online gambling as a means of easing the public into the rampant gambling addiction of AI prompt usage. [i don't need to say it, it's so apparent, just look at it, jesus]

and your new player bonus is about to run out! 💸

ok this is sick

so, this is deeply, deeply horrifying thedreydossier.substack.com/p/i-found-a-...

*clicks purge volatiles out of curiosity* *an unimaginable loss of information, commensurate with the burning of the library of Alexandria*

I've been wildly swamped with the Life/Work/School trio, but glad I put in some more time on the Decker toy theatre project. Learned quite a lot today and now have a fun little spotlight system to help indicate when you've picked your characters:

The students in my game design class had a blast trying out @increpare.bsky.social's PuzzleScript for the first time. and i'm tickled that the initial tutorial led to this dumb game where sonic clones unionize brendan-allen.com/SonicAdventu...

bennett foddy posted a deeply insightful comment on @sylviefluff.bsky.social’s games and i think it captures a lot why i found her games so reinvigorating to play. rather than finding rules to solve problems, why not find funny interactions? itch.io/post/14821693

hey!!! in 48ish hours i'm hosting another week-long "thing jam".. it's like a game jam except your game can instead be a poem or a photo or a picture or a piece of performance art or anything else! it's non-competitive, open ended and intended as an excuse to have fun! 🤸 itch.io/jam/make-lit...

"my girlfriend is AI" yeah mine too her name was Karen and she lived in harvest moon

AI boom revealed how few people had to grapple with crushing on a fictional construction as a kid

if jocks played dating sims in 2003 we could have inoculated CEOs against AI delusions at the source

If Thy Holy Magic Should Fail, Press Game Reset In Dire Circumstances ---But BEWARE, Foul Dragons Shall Rise From The Dead Alongside Thou

I really love how Adventure on the Atari uses the metaphor of reincarnation to ease people into the concept of a reset button

All the developers 404 Media talked to were excited to try using LLMs at work at first, or were at least curious about them. Their feelings about the tools, based on their personal experience, are now overwhelmingly negative. AI is rotting their brains www.404media.co/software-dev...

alright everyone, back on the canvas bus, make sure you bring everything you need and own because it's definitely safe this time [we paid for fresh wiper blade fluid]

When you think about it, really we ALL paid the ransom together ☺️ (with the data and IP Instructure scraped from our units and students) www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

footage of my ps2 running old ass deltarune

no joke I think this is like the number 2 most beneficial thing an indie developer can do (after learning how to make a game lol) because I don’t think this is a universal thought process and becoming a more well rounded person is free

Holi, anoche hice un nuevo juego poema. Dura un minutillo, de navegador (PC o móvil). Esta vez tiene música, eso es nuevo. kahsez.itch.io/atraccion

lol great timing as I work on my PhD exams that contain this word/these words about 1 million times. I refuse to be consistent

(and yes yes the wheels of academic labor precarity push us to be more and more efficient with more and more students, but please, if you have the space and ability at all, please foster actual human social and emotional stakes into the classroom like your life depends on it)

if your assignments are designed to be Disciplinary Hoop Jumping Simulators With Minimum Pedagogical Labor then guess what dude....... they're gonna use AI!!!! Students are particularly good at sniffing out grifters, after all

if you're mad at students for using AI you're mad at the wrong people. They're surrounded by authority figures (our colleagues and admin) who both tacitly and explicitly push it. ProQuest (!) pushes it. It's like getting mad at students for using MS Word (which pushes it too!!!)

every day I wake up and see new horrifying advances by my mortal enemy, the Institutional Slop Tube

why do i always feel the impulse to make the most unsettling egg-related screens possible when demoing flickgame for students

hi! it's me, anna anthropy. i wrote Rise of the Video Game Zinesters, popularized twine games, created dys4ia. after nine years of teaching game design i was laid off because of my disability, and have been unemployed for almost a year. you can buy my new self-published zine, Shareware Made Me Trans

thinking about a game boy pixel art street lamp i saw four days ago

Some areas in Paper Mario feature a rim lighting effect that is achieved in a manner that is extremely simple for the surprisingly effective results it produces, being simply shifting around a shadow copy of the sprite.

If you start feeling Ecco the Dolphin vibes, I don't blame you, as The Dolphin Rune's also has some esoteric elements framing the poetry in the game in deciphering the poem bit-by-bit through runic stones and language. Appreciation to @etherealserah.bsky.social for inspiring this dig into it.

all I'm saying is please thrash with systems that you don't understand and the pleasures of a single drop of new understanding is worth more than a million billion gajillion wasted ai tokens

CentoQuest is built in Twine 1! Twine 2 was already out in 2020 but wouldn't work on the 2009 MacBook I had lying around from college at the time that's literally split in half. And there's stuff in there incompatible with Twine 2 that, to me, gives it the core spirit.

CentoQuest, the work I'm proudest of, is explicitly built on the premise that I didn't really understand twine or programming. No idea how to make a dictionary of strings, but I did figure out how to store passage names as variables, which results in the core mechanic bibliomancer.itch.io/centoquest

I love the fact that when I play a stranger's game built in bitsy/flickgame/decker/etc it's guaranteed to be built by a human. I love seeing how people innovate when pressed up against constraint. It's why I love poetry workshops, and passing around a folded paper exquisite corpse