General Shenanigans Clearinghouse
Is there a meme that's the opposite of that Onion “Worst person you know makes a valid point” headline? When someone you respect makes repulsive assertions. Patrick McKenzie is sharp, and I like his writing (“Whether one describes them as tools or weapons depends mostly on whether one touches them with the hand or the face”). I also like his discussions of financial institutions enforcing U.S.…
I largely think “generational divides” are bullshit — there’s often more variation within generations than between them . On the other hand: Here’s the thing: I experienced physical pain sitting through an hour and a half of video discussing Vampir: Kyuuketsuki Densetsu . (Okay, I ran the video at 2x speed, but it still ended up being about 30 minutes longer than necessary.) I wish it was an…
This post starts with a shoutout to Bruno Dias for three reasons: For writing a blog post about generative AI that influenced a mammoth discussion thread on the Interactive Fiction Community Forums; For having the ability to politely ignore a poster who was too clueless to realize that Dias not only wrote the post cited in their discussion, but had also actively commented in the thread ; and For…
It’s September, which means it's time for the Interactive Fiction Competition . However, I didn’t expect IFcomp to be another battleground on which the AI conflict is playing out. I thought it was a settled issue ("you'll get AI and like it"), but Bruno Dias wrote a blog post about how “ Slop comes for everything you love ,” and his sentiments were echoed by Michael Klamerus on his blog . I'm not…
I still like the idea of blogging regularly about relevant news stories, but you never know what's worth writing about as the start of a bigger, long-term story. Like that time I got laid off by my (former!) company's Chief Marketing Officer because he outsourced my entire department — layoffs aren't particularly newsworthy, but five years later I'd learn that he (allegedly!) did it as part of a…
I’ve been struggling with games that stopped being fun (or never got fun in the first place). Bear and Breakfast: This game progressed smoothly, I enjoyed unlocking different properties, and it was fun designing room layouts that maximized revenue while meeting the minimum requirements for room bonuses. But I’m at the point where upkeep involves too much cognitive load. By the time I’m done…
(Alternate title: Too Many People are Thinking of the Children) I’m trying to figure out how to implement a practice of regular updates — something like either the Media Notes or 5 Things format that loudpoet uses. (We'll see whether it's sustainable over the long term.) ...but I never know where to start with news coverage/commentary. There’s too much to mention and it’s impossible to track it…
Geoff Engelstein brought up Amadeus while writing about “the question almost all of us have to wrestle with - what do you do when you realize that you’re very good but not great?” I… don’t find that question very relatable? (Let’s meet back here later to discuss what it's like to realize that you're very good.) Amadeus lives in my head for a different reason: it shows that most of us have to make…
When Donald and I started working on Truck Quest , we needed a design for Samson, the eccentric loner who actively opposed surveillance capitalism. It was 2018, more than 10 years since Anonymous made headlines for opposing the Church of Scientology . “Mr. Robot” had also been around for almost half a decade, which gave us some ideas about what Samson would look like and who he would be connected…
As a book, Procedural Storytelling in Game Design has not quite been what I expected. The marketing material declares that “The reader will learn to construct narrative systems, write procedural dialog, and generate compelling characters with unique personalities and backstories,” and that has not exactly been my experience. It’s never smart to believe marketing material, but this reads more like…
Combat systems are expensive for game designers. Daniel Cook, Chief Creative Officer at Spry Fox, has gone so far as to call them a resource-intensive trap . From an aesthetic perspective, Postgoodism also prefers non-violent game mechanics. When he created Don’t Get Wet , he was concerned about yet another fighting game blending in with all the combat games out there. I’ve stumbled through enough…
“Single actions can be moves in many games at once.” That’s John Padgett and Christopher Ansell describing robust action , the mechanism that the Medici family used to retain power in 15th century Venice. (Xavier Marquez also writes that robust action was how Francisco Franco managed adversarial factions in the 20th century.) TL,DR: When there’s more than one reason to do something, it’s more…
When I was creating my first games, I didn’t think I needed to bother with design documents. Eventually, I realized that I was creating them anyway. I left notes for myself in various formats: Comments in the code itself. It’s right there, which makes it easier to reference, but it gets distracting. The other problem is that it gets tricky to clean up comments later (unless you’re okay with…
During Blaugust, I read Ocho’s post about maintaining and managing a backlog of unplayed games. It gave me some things to think about. I like tracking the games I’m playing for two reasons: the mindless busywork of recordkeeping is soothing when I don’t have the time or energy for actual gaming, and it helps me manage some of the more extreme mood swings that can come from beating a game. A lot of…
I'd like to preserve some information that’s at risk of being destroyed by capricious billionaires: Ryan Kaufman's brief list of narrative choices . Choices to access content Extreme versions are just “choose ‘yes’ to continue.” (See also: Dragon Warrior’s infamous “But thou must!”) Less extreme versions gate off side content — something like asking the player if they would enjoy a game of chess .…
I used to think it was silly when shows had futuristic computers narrate what they were doing. You know, those little stream-of-consciousness declarations, like “scanning the area for life forms” or “initiating self-destruct sequence”? They seemed like cheap writing trying show the audience that things were happening. Now that I have more programming experience, it makes more sense. My early…
I enjoyed Breathedge, but it squandered a lot of potential. The early game’s creativity and open environment became more linear and less entertaining as its story unfolded . The early survival sequence is delightful — Breathedge takes place in a massive debris field that is densely packed full of items and destinations. You have to manage hunger, thirst, and oxygen levels while collecting and…
“History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme,” as they say. I’ve noticed that the current fragmentation of the internet looks like the internet migrations of the early 2000s. MySpace blew up — first in the sense of getting popular, and then in the sense of complete catastrophe — which left a lot of internet users adrift. People vowed that they would never to put all their trust in a single internet…
I came of age in the internet forums of the early 2000’s, and it was a time when posters were expected to follow a forum rules — whether those rules were written or otherwise. Ignorance was no excuse, and anybody who failed to demonstrate a mastery of “obvious” common knowledge was assaulted with lurk moar memes, encouraging them to study community etiquette before posting again. It… wasn’t the…
Tipa has a post up about taming the games backlog , and it’s entirely too relatable. Meanwhile, Ocho’s goals for August reminded me that I still have to get back to Fallout: New Vegas (although I’m reluctant to return after some ugly misadventures at Camp McCarran). What I’d really like to do is resolve some unfinished business from more than a decade ago: I finally dragged my Nintendo Wii out of…
Over at Unwinnable, they’re discussing the 2023 movie Talk to Me : “Talk to Me may be the most credible supernatural teen horror movie ever made, simply by dint of the way that the kids in the film turn the medium-istic hand into a party game, heedless of the larger questions it raises, or the possible consequences of their actions – until it is too late and those actions have come home to roost.”…
Blaugust has me thinking about dealing with the things that stop me from blogging (i.e., writer's block), and one of the tools I use is a stressbox. It’s a mashup of two lifehacks that I found on the internet: When you write down what’s bothering you, putting physical distance between yourself and the list can be like leaving your problems behind. When your inner critic is particularly fierce, you…
I’m joining Blaugust this year because the internet of the future looks like a return to the internet of the past. An article in The Verge exaggerates the current situation, but not by much: Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an “AI editor” expects…
(Image credit: Pixabay PIX 1861 ) A while back, Overthinking It discussed how players enjoy exploration and discovery in video games . The argument was that a discovery is something players learn or find. A good discovery provides a thrilling sense of accomplishment, but these discoveries are only made through the process of exploration . From a design perspective, it’s not enough for your games…
No, it wasn't in his explanation of Chaos Theory. It’s his description of Gell-Mann amnesia : “You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well [….] You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. [….] you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or…