A screenshot shows a social media post with two sections. The top section contains a comment from a user, and the lower section displays a tweet from Pop Crave. The tweet includes a cropped image of Justin Trudeau and Katy Perry, one wearing a light-colored shirt and the other with long dark hair. Their faces are obscured by rectangles. The background is plain and light-colored. The tweet says: what the land sees when you acknowledge it.

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

A lot of games hide its storytelling in its codex and it really requires a specific type of person to actually dive into it, which is not me at all. And being able to piece together the gaps in the codex while puzzle solving is just such great design that I find it inspiring.

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.

The thesis is to see the digital beyond "consumer electronics" and computation, in terms of how differences and quantification are deeply related to thoughts and theories

It challenges the well-trodden view of digitality as simply reductive, and if being "imperceptible" to AI is a viable resistance

'Digital Theory' Panel Discussion: Is Theory Itself Digital? (Fazi, Galloway, Weatherby, Handleman) YouTube video by Acid Horizon

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've come to take a middle position on the old and (tired) debate around tension bet. gameplay and narrative: in that the distinction is real only if the design & production make it real: silo-ing the story and gameplay, including the expertise without exploring their potential synergy

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

Perhaps there deserves to be more discussions around the way it is done, rather than simply pointing out that it is done at all. I understand how it is often not talked about in this way cause even the presence of critique feels refreshing in games

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

How Pac-Man Eats In How Pac-Man Eats, Noah Wardrip-Fruin considers two questions: What are the fundamental ways that games work? And how can games be about something? Wardrip...

Not exactly about the shaping perception part but Wardrip-Fruin's How Pacman Eats is about studying the changing relation between what he calls Abtract Process (functional) and Communicative Roles (metaphor): mitpress.mit.edu/978026204465...

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

Thus, the intricately balanced system feels like good craftsmanship, but merely for the sake of it, game design detached from narrative design. Each activity/outfit/skills/level-ups are understood through functions in the resource management

I still treasure the game however, pls go support it

I think one of the reasons is that each gameplay moment is not thematically generative - in terms of a new way of feeling, expressing and demonstrating the theme. The critique is felt on the level of rules, upon recognizing the intent behind the rules, not each moment the rule generates.

It's a really intriguing case study for me because, on paper, the design is thematically sound - you must balance dieting, mood, schedule and energy. The critique comes from feeling the pressure of not meeting the "quota", but playing it doesn't really feel like I'm actively reflecting on the themes

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

Highly recommend Science as Social Knowledge by Longino in contrast to some of these models btw. Or any STS scholar can point you to more complex understanding of scientific knowledge.

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).

Ahead of new game release, Animal Crossing: New Horizons book reflects on comfort, community, and capitalism Professor of Computational Media Noah Wardrip-Fruin speaks on themes explored in his new book

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...

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😶‍🌫️ 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...

The Messages Rockstar Saw Before Firing 34 Union Members YouTube video by People Make Games

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.