These road intersections look beautiful!

#genuary3 prompt is the fibonacci sequence: I used the fibonacci numbers for mapping circle color and position within each bloom.

#genuary #p5js

Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI He’s one of the loudest voices of the AI haters—even as he does PR for AI companies. Either way, Ed Zitron has your attention.

Well, there's the Wired article for starters:
www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-...

Yeah, it's in-depth enough that I learned things while still being pretty accessible.

It's not a panacea. Teaching biology didn't solve all medical controversies, this won't solve all AI problems. But it lets you understand what is actually going on with the things affecting your life.

I deeply believe that one of the best ways to prepare people to deal with AI is to teach them how it actually works.

Opinion | Stop Pretending You Know How to Teach AI Colleges are racing to make students ‘fluent.’ One problem: No one knows what that means.

I agree that we don’t already know how to teach “AI literacy” well. But I also think literacy is too modest a goal. College students should graduate knowing how ML works; it’s liberal knowledge analogous to RNA or trig, not search-engine skills or Excel. And we do know how to teach it in that way.

It kind of makes sense to me: it represents words as vectors, so it just finds the nearest vector that conveys roughly similar meaning in context.

...except holy shit we can turn words into vectors and do math on them according to their contextual meaning?

So it wraps back around to being eerie.

Sounds familiar.
Was it called minus?

When I say that I refuse to use AI to do necromancy, I do mean that rather literally.

I'm just saying that humanity has specifically been training for millennia for the eventuality of encountering alien intelligences that follow their own sense of reality and keep promises even when you don't want them to.

Some of you would definitely take fairy gold and be surprised when it turned to leaves in the morning.

This is not disproving my thesis that AI models are the fair folk, and should be approached accordingly.

But overall I think it is very genre-dependent, because a necessary tutorial in one genre is a puzzle-spoiling walkthrough in another.

bsky.app/profile/djan...

Playing off Koster's theory of fun, learning how to play is often the fun part of the game, so teaching the player too much too directly can suck all the fun out of the game. It's a balancing act!

Understanding Systems Suspense Why is it fun to learn the rules of a videogame? Not just to play the game, but to learn it; to travel from the state of unknowing to knowing, to be surprised when a revelation subverts your expectati...

Systems suspense games require discoverability. You can have a wiki-heavy game (Dwarf Fortress) or a heavily tutorialized game that uses it (Stanley's Parable) but in general I suspect they tend towards a lighter touch.

polarisgamedesign.com/2023/underst...

My central belief is that if you can induct the player into the core ritual of the game, everything else is a bonus. What's your core loop?

As long as the player has a sense of what they can do next and where to look for information about what to anticipate, they can learn the rest as they go.

Games you expect to continually consult the wiki (e.g., Minecraft) have taken some steps for more discoverability, but Minecraft's in-game tutorialization is achievements.

Some markets you expect to have minutes at most to get the player onboard (f2p mobile games, etc.) so it makes sense to rush.

Like, I think I'm seeing several categories:
- Knowledge games
- Wiki-reference games
- Onboarding games
- System suspense games
- Any others?

bsky.app/profile/brun...

Between the tutorialization discourse and the knowledge gated game discourse, I'm gravitating toward a theory of genre specific player learning.

Procedural generation has been applied to many kinds of game content including levels, puzzles and narrative. Although PCG researchers have tackled the generation of rules and mechanics, these systems typically operate on bespoke codebases designed for mechanic invention tasks. In this pa-per we present Pixie, a system for generating and testing game mechanics that can be installed in any Unity project and configured using a simple annotation process to focus its scope and objectives. We describe the system’s design and operation, demonstrate its ability to generate mechanics for several open-source Unity games, and provide an initial discussion of developer perspectives on the content it generates and its usefulness as a design companion.

New Paper: Pixie: Code-Level Mechanic Generation for Game Designers. How do you connect automatic game design to real games? Pixie is a mechanic generation system for Unity games, as an example framework for how to build AGD systems into real game platforms.

Read here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

Title slide. We Are Maxwell's Demons: The Thermodynamics of Procedural Generators. Younès Rabii. Roguelike Celebration 2025. Bottom right: pixel art of a tiny guy heating up a teapot.

Tune in to @roguelike.club in 3 hours for my talk about the analogy between physics and procedural generation! We'll see how generators can be solid, liquid or gaseous and why –just like Maxwell's Demon– designers are underrated little guys. 🍵🫖

So I think you want Hal Clement, then. Mission of Gravity, etc.

As mentioned, Ander's The City in the Middle of the Night is literally climate fiction on a tidelocked planet, so probably also counts.

Forward's Dragon's Egg is set on a neutron star, but otherwise fits.

Roguelike Celebration 2025 a community-generated weekend of talks, games, and conversations about roguelikes and related topics

This year's Roguelike Celebration steam sale is up! Check out some awesome games, and don't forget to buy tickets for the conference *this weekend*!

(also @shing.bsky.social's art is so good, I'm so glad we got them to do this year's art!!)

store.steampowered.com/curator/4122...

I Am a Doctor Now!
Little blog announcing my dissertation is now published and readable!
(And i have not been posting here so this also serves as the announcement that I am a PhD now lol)
bjarke.it/article/i-am...

For some things it'd be cool to be able to do the tool call completely inline; it's theoretically not a hard technical challenge to wire up a calculator as part of inference, but since it takes both training the model and editing the inference I haven't seen an implementation.

Healing from my tooth extraction has been rough, please check out my Ko-fi, perhaps leave a buck? Or just share it around

What grad students? We cut the funding and we're replacing them with AI too.

Join us for:
- a peek at the 2025 Roguelike Celebration social space
- a fireside chat with @perryjon.bsky.social about design & proc gen in UFO 50
- @apepers.bsky.social talking about Designing for Systems Suspense
- @ezra-szanton.itch.io talking about Synergy Webs in Roguelike Deckbuilders

Not at all close. Novel-length plots are very hard. There has been a consistent, odd, overreaction on this.