I’m currently kicking around some ideas about trying to articulate the difference between form, function, and process. 1 I’m using these terms in an idiosyncratic way, but the basic thing I’m trying to convey is: We have constructed much of our society around particular forms of output; the student’s essay is the form. Often the form is the only thing we formally identify (Seeing-like-a-state…
Sometimes, the paths of this labyrinth converge.
The words that it can't say are sometimes as important as the words it can.
If you can't describe what you really want, it's going to give you what you really asked for.
Hard things are easy. Easy things are hard.
Every rule system describes a space of existence.
I had a lot of time during the pandemic [...] to solve a murder mystery with my housemates.
The roughness of the generation is as important as the range.
Some games work better with more friction.
Some game graphics are more real than others
Every game offers a fantasy, and there are many different ways for them to fulfill those fantasies for players. A focus on agency and strategy has lead us to overlook the importance of performance. (And also why the players themselves are a part of the mechanics.)
A community of practice has research debt when its students and researchers know they need to learn some topic X, but the avalable exposition on topic X is very dense...
This week is about design space, and its navigation via generative instruments.
I am revisiting the definition of software instruments today.
We describe software instruments as a family of interactive computational mediums (i.e. game-like artifacts) spanning both toys and tools...
Ludic mystery games — games that lean into the joy of feeling bewildered — invite us to import the social, discursive learning methodolgies of the real world.
Some software feels bigger than other software: why?
In creative collaboration, mere action is insufficient to communicate intent.
Nier: Automata knows that it is a videogame
These are the notes of the Seabright Camerata, a loose working group of scholar-practitioners in expressive computation.