Victoria 3 designer on why communism is OP: 'We just implemented the mechanics the way we understood them' Some players of the grand strategy game are discovering a lot to like about turn-of-the-century communism.

Doing some revisions on a historical games article and had cause to go remember that time Paradox accidentally did a socialism :) - www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-c...

"I was supposed to bring the rope but all I had in my pocket was this bit of string - and everyone laughed at me when I tried to get it around the condemned's neck" :(

Picked myself up and managed to do something - didn't get any work done obvs, but did manage to watch Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which has been on my list for forever but not exactly a film to watch with a 3 year old - that opening montage is one of the most powerful pieces of cinema I've ever seen.

I'm just starting work on an article about comedy videogames and British history, FFAK and Astrologaster are my core case studies

Listening to Kawika Guillermo's 'Of Floating Isles' on audible - it is everything that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow failed to be - it is an account of how games transform people and become structures for seeing the world and processing emotion, grounded in lived and heartbreaking experience.

Is part of a multi player experience? Information asymmetry in something like Hell Let Loose, or frantic co-operation in Overcooked, or the long-term investment in MMO guilds would all be opportunities to build empathy, but it'd be hard to say they were designed for it the way That Dragon Cancer is?

I was thinking videogames but I'd welcome any other suggestion - that is a really interesting take - I posted same Q on Discord and someone mentioned it there too - can you think of good examples where the empathy (which I'd associate with a measured, introspective, narrative experience)

Random question - if you were gonna list 3 games that support the 'games are good at building empathy' argument - which ones would you pick?

*I know this is a controversial topic, so I'd be extra interested in cases where people know the issues, but have games they still think fit the bill

Feeling very vindicated in my ability to recognise Pip Torrens on the basis of a split second in-motion shot half in shadow :) The Favourite this will not be I fear, but it looks interesting

A24 are making a film adaptation of the Backrooms? The canon of videogame->film adaptations is going to look so weird in a few years time - it's going to be all weird indie horror like Iron Lung, Backrooms or FNAF getting surprisingly glossy hollywood treatment at one end, or Super Mario/Minceraft?

Boris Karloff having a tea break on the set of the movie Frankenstein. The words 'I SHOULD TERRORISE A VILLAGE' are at the bottom of the image.

Wednesday 🎬
#filmsky #moviesky #cinema

. @kimchica.bsky.social x 10,000 she's wonderful :)

For anyone interested, it's the 'Derby Address' from 1792 - a declaration from the Constitutional Society of Derby in support of the French Revolution, which was delivered in Paris! One of the Derby delegates later apparently attempted suicide when the Revolution went sour

Heya #skystorians - can anyone help me? I'm away from my library atm and looking for Jenny Graham's The Nation, The Law, and the King, Volume 1 - specifically Appendix A, which seems to be around p. 913? If it's not too long and someone wouldn't mind sharing photos that'd be amazing tysm!

There is a hundred and fifty, or more, to see, to catch pokemon is my des-tin-y

I'm working on a proposal for a book on Metroidvanias and the Gothic :)

Derrick Wrote a Book! YouTube video by GVG

So what the hell have I been teasing with those screenshots? I wrote a book about the history and evolution of the Metroidvania genre! I'm proud to present, as published by @lostincult.co.uk, A Communal History of Metroidvania Video Games! youtu.be/XtyItrRaG9c?...

a woman is dancing in front of a group of men and the word non is on the bottom of the image . ALT: a woman is dancing in front of a group of men and the word non is on the bottom of the image .

Don't forget Steelrising, such an underrated Soulslike - still one of the richest representations of Ancien Regime France I've ever seen in a videogame.

Can the common people be enlightened? How should cultural elites and political leaders embark on the task? A new article on the 18thC debate, re-assessing Gadamer's claim that the Enlightenment harboured a “prejudice against all prejudices.”
doi.org/10.1017/S147...

a cartoon drawing of a rabbit and a bee in a dark forest ALT: a cartoon drawing of a rabbit and a bee in a dark forest

My chapter focuses on Hollow Knight and Gothic Epistemology - reading the Metroidvania genre through the lens of #Gothic to explore how the genre serves the same function as novels by Radcliffe or Lewis, using disturbing emotional experiences to break down the barriers between reality and fiction.

Games That Haunt Us Games That Haunt Us: Gothic Game Space as a Living Nightmare is an examination of how the Gothic appears in game space to interrogate an area of substantial imp…

The wonderful collection Games That Haunt Us, edited by @mutanttheorist.bsky.social is out today!

Couldn't be prouder to be included in an absolutely wonderful collection that really demonstrates just how interdisciplinary and innovative our field can be!

www.bloomsbury.com/uk/games-tha...

Also fyi for anyone interested - the website of @francksauer.bsky.social - the artist behind these backgrounds - is a wonderful collection of pretty deep game design histories from the art/production perspective - francksauer.com/index.php/ga...

Amiga Graphics Archive - Games - Agony

Apropos of nothing very much - other than having seen this GIF come up on Bsky recently - I'm wondering if the pixel art from Agony (1992), on the Commodore Amiga, might just be the apex of the form for its generation - truly awe-inspiring:

amiga.lychesis.net/games/Agony....

Happy March 15. Here is my favorite Ides of March meme:

Game rewards after spending 200+ hrs to finish them

Breath of the Wild: Congrats you saved Zelda and Hyrule

God of War: Congrats you killed all the gods

mass effect: Congrats you resolved the Reaper crisis and saved the galaxy

Blue Prince: Well done you, here's a card with "Blue" written on it

My cousin's baby is a Silas 🫨

Yuna pointing “faggots let me hear some noise”

HAPPY 23RD ANNIVERSARY TO THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME

White House splices Iran strike footage with Wii game in bizarre video The Trump administration has released a bizarre video that splices footage from a Nintendo Wii game with real-life drone strike videos from the conflict in Iran. The video, posted to the White House's...

The uncomfortable alignment of the games industry with the military industrial complex, ideologies of empire and extractive capitalism, and fascist ideology is a deep and nuanced issue going back decades - I can't think of an example more stupid than this:

www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/iran...

A GDC slide about the 87 percent game preservation study. Which I wrote! And it's not my slide!

[clapping like a seal] #GDC2026

Are you joining our Videogame Preservation Online event today? Tell us what you're hoping to hear about #vgpres26