Hey I wanted to share out a recently released capstone project from my student Bernadine Mattson! Doo-Daa is a collaged RPG Maker MZ 2003 game where you play as an astronaut cat handing out informational pamphlets marketing the planet Earth to Dadaist aliens. bobby4apples.itch.io/doo-daa

I'm going to be exploring integration as a theory-of-change with @semble.so! Augmenting existing knowledge tools like Zotero, Obsidian, etc. with the collective sense-making happening on Semble. If this is something you would find helpful I would love to hear more about what you're looking for 😄

It's exciting to dig into procedural magic after going on about it for more than ten years. The game maps out random cosmological facts tied together by multi-node research methods. These methods used by proc wizard/etc types that discover proc skills and rituals, in the fort and world generation.

IT WORKS! We have zork on ATProto now.My bot stores no state on its server - the entire gamestate is serialized into a blob inside each of the bot's replies and stored in the PDS. Whole thing runs from a laptop, game engine is a pure reduce function. No jetstream, no open ports, reads from appview

To get unhinged with it: maybe all fiction-based affect is the 'sound' produced by plucking the modeled facts of a mental simulation into vibration; gameplay fidgeting is one frequency band

the Streets of Fortuna version of Achilles/Hercules/Gilgamesh is being written by @jfg.land RIGHT NOW and I am WAY more stoked to read his writing than I am to see even 1 more second of discourse about whatever hollywood thinks it's doing or not doing with greek masculinity

recapping on the AIIDE 2025 Experimental AI in Games + Interactive Narrative Technology workshops this afternoon with Emily's comprehensive 🧵 & commentary

My annual reminder that we are both the best conference in games and the most misnamed conference in games. If you’re making weird or interesting art using procedurality, procgen, deep systemic simulation, we want your talk, regardless of what your relationship to “roguelikiness” is!

Part of the answer is in this 💯 quote from @bpfaffenberger.bsky.social: “Technology, in short, is a mystifying force of the first order[, ] suspending us in webs of significance that we ourselves create.” (p. 250) But there's nuance when it comes to "why" and ANNs... doi.org/10.5281/zeno... 11/

What do you think of the FoC podcast. No, srsly, what do you think? Give us feedback. FEEDBACK. FEED FEED FEED. @joshuahhh.com offers a visual notation for thinking about live programming interfaces, and it's baller. Yeah, but what's the secret? What does it mean to find? Sound off in the commen-

🌖 Amberspire is OUT NOW! 🌇 A dice driven science fantasy city builder. Grow your city atop a mausoleum moon, interact with strange weather and ecology, gain influence to make deals with powerful off-world factions, experience the history of a future city. PC, Mac, Steam Deck s.team/a/3350750

Getting looped into convos about this book in its finishing stages expanded the scope of theory around neural networks in LLMs & Media — it opened up so many productive ways of thinking for me. Essential reading for anyone who’s been looking for a fresh theorization of critical AI.

That insecurity, basically, is a demon voice asking "but what is this GOOD for" in the face of any form of study or reflection, a dependency on the obvious payoff for any line of research or thought - instrumentalism, because people did not trust themselves to think without a problem to solve.

The idea that LLMs are bringing forth a new age of malleability, particularly through vibe coding, is a co-option of what malleability has historically meant. It achieves similar surface characteristics without the restructuring of power and literacy historically EUP advocates aimed to challenge.

"zoomers pine for the world presented in the x-files" is an incredible example of, like. artwork that explicitly mourns the dissolution of institutions and civic life being later held up as an example of strong institutions and civic life

I am enjoying this game way too much. store.steampowered.com/app/3119540/...

I also published a new pervasive journaling rpg for one called Skin Deep this winter. It uses mechanics like drawing on the body to blur the lines between fiction and reality, and can be played for either horror or empowerment. mothmother.com/games

Brief fun survey from Jessica, Andrew & myself: If you are a faculty member, research scientist, postdoc, or senior Ph.D. student in any area of science, please take five minutes and fill it out. We’ll share the results widely along with some reflections. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

sounds like we need to invent internet ecologists that explain how the systems work to everyday people in order to build political motivation to save the ecosystems we all rely on in digital spaces

the fencing visualization system i worked on with rhizomatiks is coming to los angeles this weekend 🤗

Made a gallery where you can preview @jatazak.bsky.social's painted Frosthaven models, captured via photogrammetry! barrettrees.com/MiniGallery-...

open-ended composability is the norm in advanced professional tooling and in children’s toys, but it’s rare in between

It strikes me that even in things like the Matrix where they're all in simulation, it's a shared simulation. One horror of the chatbot is that everyone is isolated into their own reality with the amplifying social permission of a group, and none of the friction

Concern about the cognitive effects of LMs is based on the premise that they're an answer machine. And they can definitely be used that way. But I think ppl who are using models to solve actual problems (not homework problems) experience the tech as a free-writing, dialogue, and revision machine. +

Today I'm proud of Jayne Everson for masterfully defending her dissertation, "Computing is for Everybody: Pedagogy for Joyful Secondary Computing." She shared 5 studies, demonstrating that feminist pedagogies encourage joyful secondary computing education. Congratulations Jayne!

The Yarn Spinner folks just casually decided to fire guided missiles at half of games narrative I guess yarnspinner.dev/blog/tarot-y...

Now that AI Literacy Day is over: mail.cyberneticforests.com/human-litera...

one thing that always amuses me is when someone posting on reddit writes “it would be cool if this upcoming game did X” and then I immediately flash to a postmortem from half a decade ago that’s like “doing X ended up not being very effective”

*bewilderedly* Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone? *with growing ire* It has to be made, like bread?? *shaking with indignation* Remade all the time??? Made new?!

Models of science focus on how scientific agents/activities reach solutions or produce discoveries. I think this is why they're often so useless at actually explaining how science does what it does. We need to understand how science generates problems because that's exactly where it excels.

I've written a book! Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves is the story of procedural generation - the tech behind games like Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress. It's about how it works, the games that use it, and the art and magic behind it. Out May 7th, in bookshops: linktr.ee/next_level 🎲🔮

Ok, mobile-Layout #flickgame beta (with QoL improvements on desktop too) www.flickgame.org/beta/ - likely buggy but maybe a good direction. Good time for feedback. Feedback welcome.

Hypnogenesis is a video synthesis arcade game using recursive video feedback where images are fed back on themselves to create emergent visual behaviors. Andy Wallace & Allen Riley talk about how it’s part of alternative history of games coming out of Nam June Paik style video art & video synthesis

Pelicans using the shape of an ocean’s wave to fly. Ravens in a state of play is one of the greatest miracles in the world. @cabbibo wants to make a game about the embodied experience of flying in their psychedelic Bird Game

Been developing that goldfinch with some friends since my birthday and it’s becoming something really spectacular. Fits all our clay bodies, stable af, feeling really proud of it and our teamwork.

I think you're completely right. This was already a trend that was affecting games as far back as 2002-2004. Noticing this trend was in fact the initial impetus behind the Wii.

It's out! So many amazing essays. (I can't wait to get my copy!)

Wrote a mini-essay, "Digital Topology & Economic Power", on how the file went from a site of user agency to one of enclosure — through proprietary formats, data internalization, then the cloud. Each step bundling real gains with a quiet transfer of power. www.orionreed.com/posts/app-fi...

Great points by @ai4geo.bsky.social: "LLMs are not destiny machines. They do not inevitably corrode the minds that encounter them. They amplify whatever epistemic posture you bring — passivity into dependency, vigilance and participation into something genuinely powerful."

I want tarot gays to find my game! We worked so hard on the reading procgen, I'm so proud of the ~ * grammar * ~

earlier this summer I published my first paper of my phd! ✨ a qualitative study on how creative writers are using AI in their writing and what their strategies were in order to align with their personal writing values

It’s easy to see WHY the field of cybernetics was betrayed by the circumstances of its most favored founders and adherents. The early participants invited to the early Macy Conferences were overwhelmingly white and male. It was 1942. Segregation was the norm in New York.

"Just as the invention [of industrial automation] had the paradoxical effect of turning more [people] into full-time industrial workers, so has all the software designed to save us from administrative responsibilities turned us into part- or full-time administrators" — David Graeber

I come out on the Nintendo Switch tomorrow. Buy my ass to support www.nintendo.com/us/store/pro...

LLMs are worse at telling suspenseful stories than at other writing. IMO, widespread view that this is because they lack “originality” or “artistry” marks a giant failure of 20c lit crit. In school we learn everything about stories but the main point: which is to entertain readers by misleading. +

Enjoying and admiring this piece from @mjcrockett.bsky.social on 'Empathy, thick and thin' papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... This is my fave kind of review: generous, well-informed, and opinionated. Citing judiciously, cutting through tangles without losing the thread, showing new vistas

& ICYMI, I'm hiring at SF Digital Services! if you are or know an strong eng leader with amazing communication skills & a civic bent (already pursued or nascent!) please read this thread!!

Interesting reflection on the "sentimental" aesthetic of AI agents performing self-consciousness. I like the idea that it can be more interesting to let them be pure theater, i.e., full inhabitation of persona without getting tripped up on self-awareness

I drew Ethel Cain in MacPaint from 1984 with a 25 year old mouse

Going to be reupping this periodically over the next month. Have thoughts about traditional craft work? A project on where traditional and platform economies collide? Analog/digital relationship in craft and creative work? Send me an abstract.