Alan

A screenshot from Celeste. Madeline stands by a memorial dedicated to those who perished on the climb up Celeste Mountain.

happy transgender day of remembrance

thank you for sticking around in the hardest of times. if you haven't, you are missed dearly

please live 💜

Lewis Capaldi's new song ...

Can someone please go check on him?

It still haunts me that Scott from Frightened Rabbit basically wrote a whole album saying goodbye to the world and we all sang along and bopped to it ... I don't think I could take it happening again.

Reality is boring science fiction: authors spent years warning us that if we put AI in everything it will eventually try and eat us, but instead it just monitors our behaviour to show us ads whenever we reach for the milk.

This talk by @cwpat.me really demonstrates how taking a process-oriented logical mind and applying it to an abstract problem can result in incredible, creative and artistic results.

Patrick Traynor joins us at ThinkyCon 2025 to present the talk: "The Programming of Patrick's Parabox" Talk description: This talk covers a few specific programming implementations from the development of Patrick's Parabox, an award-winning recursive sokoban game released in 2022. Specific topics i The Programming of Patrick's Parabox - Patrick Traynor (ThinkyCon 2025)

In this lightning talk, Patrick Traynor goes over the programming of Patrick's Parabox: an award-winning recursive sokoban game!
@cwpat.me

Re: that rt. the average businessy business suit type would be so much happier if they really WERE the soulless capitalist they like to posture as.

The reality is that most do what they do for the same reason creative types do: a crushing need for love, respect and community. They should paint.

But again, maybe that's natural.

Every new multimedia technology has served to increase the rate at which media and society evolves, so maybe we are at the point where we can now create, explore, exhaust and then dismantle and move past a form within a century?

It's confusing to me because I still see the art of game development as massively under-evolved, full of nieve takes and inefficient processes, but at the same time I think we really have reached a creative zenith of the medium to some degree.

It feels like we did a commercialisation speed run.

What I mean by this is that it makes sense for the "industry", while the "art" moves on: with the possibility space of the form nearing fully explored, the adventurous creators are forced outside the form into new and uncharted territory.

Essentially all forms of media "die" to some degree.

Reflecting on media's obsession with remakes & brand cultures, could it not be argued that we're just hitting a point of post-modernism in cinema and games where we've established enough "staples" that anything new will inevitably be derivative of existing brands, so sadly it makes sense to recycle?

Tried to lazily image search for "Chat GPT logo" and then copy-paste it into my lecture slide, but the image was set up to protect against people doing that.

The Irony.

The han solo dance from Star Wars Kinect is the pinnacle of star wars media and I will hear no slander of it

Well, I don't know quite how you're reading it, but I'd have thought any project that's gone into production without thorough testing has the odds stacked against it being good - that's an unhealthy project.

We need entrepreneurial go-getters, but we also need to be honest about the prospects.

I'd add to this that if you're already so far into development that players would have story details spoiled by testing, and you haven't playtested all the above things yet ... you're not in a healthy place, let's leave it at that.

💯
Playtesting can help you:
- Make sure people are taking away what you want them to from your story
- Balance combat encounters on a proper curve
- Ensure your UI/UX is as intuitive as it needs to be
- Find out where people are getting stuck when they shouldn't be

... and so much more!

I don't know - I always tell my students that your goal isn't to design a GAME, it's to design a PLAYER EXPERIENCE, and it can be hard to put experiences and emotions into words.

Sometimes wild gesticulation and mouth noises are a suprisingly effective way to get the idea across!

As an educator, the thing I want to do is teach less "game dev" in the sense of how to crunch a AAA title, and more "fundamental design" in the sense of "how to make rational decisions about what to make, and to understand the creative plan for what's to come".

But I don't know how much it'll help

I've heard this a few times recently from indies: even if someone says they don't need a playable proof of a concept, you'll be competing with people who have them, and you can't develop a PoC without funding and time.

I really struggle with finding an answer, because we've normalised chaotic dev.

I've been out of touch for a while, but last I checked we still had people in the big money AAA sphere acting like it's all just an extended game jam where you kick off with a theme, setting and genre and away you go.

Weirdly, I've seen more indies with a better approach (but also worse ones too)

Our industry is really, really, really bad at actually DESIGNING things and doing pre-production.

Controversial opinion, maybe, but if you don't inherently know the ins-and-outs of the fun of what you're making, you're still in pre-production. You don't yet have a viable product.

Rockstar accused of firing over 30 union members in 'calculated attack on workers' UK union IWGB claims the Grand Theft Auto maker has committed the 'most blatant and ruthless act of union busting in the history of the games industry.'

Rockstar accused of firing over 30 union members in 'calculated attack on workers'

I miss this bit!

I used to do it in reverse: I'd get handed scripts and treatments and had to come up with games. It was a great exercise: scouring them for repeated actions and motivations, and then using those to construct game systems.

If you've got friends that you know have #ADHD (and especially if they're also #Autistic) consider just asking them what today's intrusive thought is and intently listening to whatever they say for 15m.

They'll probably really appreciate the chance to vent it!

I used to have a colleague that played in a band, and they'd sometimes have a night where they invited people on stage to play the NES Super Mario Bros while they did all the SFX and music through percussion, which was pretty cool.

Dutch Parliamentary Elections really help you grasp the brilliance and the horror of democratic process.

Honestly, I loved watching the Dutch system. It's the end goal of democracy: a genuine melting-pot of different ideas that results in constant fighting, compromise and nobody getting anything they actually want.

It's ineffective and frustrating specifically because it does what it's meant to do.

Why Trump’s White House is using video game memes to recruit for ICE A recent spate of posts has garnered attention, but Trump and his allies have long been using gaming imagery to mobilise a toxic subculture of ‘rootless white males’

This appropriation of gaming imagery and culture to push authoritarianism is, as @alyssamerc.bsky.social points out here, the natural extension of what Gamergate began

www.theguardian.com/games/2025/o...

“I think they are a profoundly antisocial technology that should be rejected in every way possible,” said Gilliard. “Their very existence is toxic to the social fabric." It’s still up in the air whether Meta’s gamble on glasses will pay off. Beyond their horrifying privacy implications, wearable AI-powered devices like Bee and Friend so far have proven more obnoxious than useful, and it’s unclear whether people who buy them will even want to use them. But one thing many privacy experts agree on is that even if we can’t change the law, we can change peoples’ attitudes around consent. “One way to think about it is protecting your community and the people you care about,” said Gilliard. “When you’re wearing these glasses, when you use your video doorbell, when you record everyone’s conversations, you’re not just surveilling yourself. And there’s no consistent and foolproof way to guarantee that information won’t be used against people you care about — to hurt trans and queer people, or hurt immigrant communities. I wish people would think about it in those terms instead of ‘did my package get delivered.’”

call them whatever you like, the reality is 'smart glasses' are surveillance devices designed by tech companies to violate consent and rewrite social norms. social shaming is still a more effective a deterrent than the law. @hypervisible.blacksky.app

www.theverge.com/tech/807834/...

I feel like Microsoft really underestimate the emotional impact of changing the default mail icon on my phone OS.