After Kirkbride left Bethesda, he worked briefly at LucasArts, and would have lunch under a brass statue of Yoda. “I started thinking about nuclear winter,” he said. “In the apocalypse, once someone finds the Yoda statue, what are they going to think? Whoever tells the best story about the origin of the Yoda statue, that’s what’s going to be fact about Yoda.” The story will not be true, but it will be meaningful: like life, the meaning is all in taking part.

Was absolutely riveted by this feature by @duncanfyfe.net on The Elder Scrolls and lore over at @remapradio.bsky.social

remapradio.com/articles/who...

I'm curating a list

"only" oh my god

thank you!

Can't recommend enough that you read this amazing piece and then listen to the author discussing it with Rob Zacny:
open.spotify.com/episode/2EZf...

I particularly enjoy that the author pulled a fun meta twist and added all sort of contradicting quotes & viewpoints on world-building

Great article about lore, and of the Elder Scrolls lore in particular, but there's a really fun bit with Gary Gygax at the start:

Who Cares About the Lore? The creation and imperfect preservation of The Elder Scrolls' intentional incoherence.

Here’s @duncanfyfe.net on the intentionally tangled lore of The Elder Scrolls and the creative forces that shaped that world a pivotal moment before its mass popularity. remapradio.com/articles/who...

Really excellent piece digging into some of the development of Morrowind. I remember playing it as a teenager and being amazed not only at its strange world, but contradictory theologies and histories. It breathed a real life into the entire setting im not sure I’ve ever seen again in a game.

did some illustrations for this piece! it was super fun~

To be clear, this is why I subscribe to @remapradio.bsky.social. There are so few places to find writing as fascinating as this, telling stories that both illuminate the history of the medium and also grapple with the question of what the fuck lore is, was, or if it is worth caring about.

Who Cares About the Lore? The creation and imperfect preservation of The Elder Scrolls' intentional incoherence.

Check out this very interesting (and I suspect divisive!) article on the creation of TES lore. It asks the fundamental question: should lore have one definitive canon?

Featuring interviews with many devs, as well as fans like me.

remapradio.com/articles/who...

Who Cares About the Lore? The creation and imperfect preservation of The Elder Scrolls' intentional incoherence.

Morrowind in the hearts and minds of gamers lately 😤

But you don't have to care about TES to enjoy this. Really excellent article on game lore and worldbuilding from @duncanfyfe.net.

(Glad as ever @remapradio.bsky.social is providing space for pieces like this)

remapradio.com/articles/who...

This is a really excellent piece and your relationship with Elder Scrolls, or even caring about "lore," has no bearing on whether you'll enjoy this exploration about the role of world building in storytelling.

Who Cares About the Lore? The creation and imperfect preservation of The Elder Scrolls' intentional incoherence.

For @remapradio.bsky.social, I wrote about the worldbuilding business, and the apparently irreconcilable lore of Bethesda's ELDER SCROLLS games. This is about people who love lore, people who make it, people who break it, and those who do all three.

remapradio.com/articles/who...

this week on Remap: an absolutely monstrous piece from me on Lore, and who cares about it

The real-world paths to hell How tourists became obsessed with finding the gates to the underworld of Greek mythology

There is a submerged cave at Greece's Mani peninsula said to be where Orpheus descended after the shade of Eurydice; today, according to one tour guide, it's where swimmers like to stop and have a shit

www.ft.com/content/6c96...

I'm in the FT magazine this weekend, writing on one of my favourite subjects

The real-world paths to hell How tourists became obsessed with finding the gates to the underworld of Greek mythology

There is a submerged cave at Greece's Mani peninsula said to be where Orpheus descended after the shade of Eurydice; today, according to one tour guide, it's where swimmers like to stop and have a shit

www.ft.com/content/6c96...

I'm in the FT magazine this weekend, writing on one of my favourite subjects

This is somehow the most haunting bit of in-game lore I have ever read.

A real honour to write something for Jacob's new book, and a real pleasure to have an excuse to carry out this particular investigation

A third of the way through the Anachronox demo, the player encounters a hulking alien merchant. “My sorrow runs deep,” the merchant, whose name is Demonstrare, says. “I will only exist for the short duration of this demo. I do not exist in the full version. “Write the company. Tell them that you want me in the full version.” What Demonstrare, even with his curse of self-awareness, did not anticipate was that if anyone did ask Ion Storm to bring him over to “the full version,” it wouldn’t have mattered. The demo shipped on a disc stuck to the cover of a PC Gamer — where it shared space with now-forgotten

titles like Throne of Darkness and The Corporate Machine — four months after Anachronox itself had been released, and three months after Ion Storm’s parent company had shut down the studio. Demonstrare never made it to Anachronox. And while twenty-five years later the game can run on modern hardware, the demo does not. Demonstrare is gone. Recently, I asked Richard Gaubert, the writer of Anachronox, if the developers ever heard anything about Demonstrare. Gaubert didn’t even remember the character.

Here is a little bit of @duncanfyfe.net's afterword for "How Can We Bear to Throw Anything Away?"

All Will Rise: a narrative courtroom deck-builder A game about taking a billionaire to court for the murder of a river.

BACK ALL WILL RISE on KICKSTARTER if you're into
💜 citizen sleeper x ace attorney
🔥 revenge against the epstein class
🤑 marxist-animist weirdness
🃏 card-based narrative
🇮🇳 set in alternate india
✨ dreams of dead gods
🍃 branching stories
✊ WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT
www.kickstarter.com/projects/spe...

Chapter 1 of Moby Dick, page 1 The phrase ‘Call me Ishmael’, the first sentence of the book, is highlighted in blue, with careful highlighting on the very big C at the start. Above this, written in ballpoint pen ‘His name’

Love the glimpse into the beautiful mind that notated this used copy of Moby Dick I got

All Will Rise: a narrative courtroom deck-builder A game about taking a billionaire to court for the murder of a river.

14 years ago we accidentally hired a genius to write the script for 80 Days. Now she’s narrative director on a deck-builder about billionaire busting.

Check out All Will Rise:

"rich dipshit owner doesn't understand the industry he's bought into and clumsily destroys what made it good" feels less like a narrative unique to the washington post and more like the music that's been playing in the background of all our lives for at least 40 years

in 2026, let's bring back the concept of "selling out" and once again make it contemptible

I think it's important to know that an oral history of Tim Curry's greatest line delivery exists

here it is

(and yes, it was his first take, and yes, they kept it anyway because how could you not)

26 // Space is the final frontier and it’s where Tim Curry’s Soviet Premier wants to go in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. You can learn more than you ever wanted to know about the game’s most infamous scene in this oral history from @duncanfyfe.net.

videogameresearchlibrary.com/an-oral-hist...

Esses Issue 04 Issue 04 dives deeper than ever into the lives of those who drive and those who are driven. Check out what Charles Leclerc and Antoine Truchet are building with SIDEQUEST. Ride shotgun with Zoey Edenh...

Only in print (and extremely beautiful there), my profile of Formula 1's sim racing champion, Jarno Opmeer:

essesmag.myshopify.com/products/ess...