Alexei Pepers

Stacey has what is to me the definitive analysis of all this discourse on games and art:

The pianola museum in Amsterdam where I got to hear a concert of music unplayable with human hands. Or the KattenKabinet, also Amsterdam, an historic building stuffed with cat-themed art ranging from Picasso, Rembrandt, cat mummies, statues of cats fucking, and costumes from hit musical Cats.

Love that you’ve got the same opinion as Kawa here.

(I’m fine, it had cooled enough and I had a handy bowl of ice water right there, so my hand just feels raw and tingly and not “oops hospital time”)

Today I executed shallow frying tempura in a cast iron with great finesse and no splatter… then submerged my entire hand in recently-boiling water while making the soba 🥲

I saw an early build of this like two years ago and was immediately charmed; really recommend wishlisting if you’re a fan of city builders, simulation, or thinky games

I wish I knew where on the spectrum of:

"ppl feel helpless and are taking it out on anyone within reach, usually the people with the least power"

to

"ppl have become so customer-brained that they treat anyone/anything that seems "bigger" than them as the enemy"

that this hostility comes from.

I often think of how when I was a kid, cleaning bug splatter off the windshield and grill was a whole summer chore. And then I feel deep existential dread.

The backstory here is that the Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of this land a century ago. They sued, got their land back, and are using their sovereignty to ignore local zoning rules and build 6,000 new homes over the objections of nearby wealthy NIMBYs.

Thank you, I really appreciate it :) I’m a nerd about public speaking, I love getting a chance to write about it and help potential speakers out.

Putting 2 tablespoons of dill into my mushroom soup instead of 2 teaspoons and inventing a new meal I call Swamp Water

Pentiment is a great game because you start as a silly little guy making funny decision but before you know it all of them come home to roost and shit is miserable.

Wild animals that at least briefly lived in my home growing up include: least weasel, raven, mountain chickadee, Wilson’s snipe.

My early childhood was in a literal log cabin and we constantly had flying squirrels and starlings getting stuck in the basement drop ceiling.

Alexei is right, we NEED someone to do an Uma Musume talk on the roguelike elements of horse girl coaching for the event @roguelike.club in October

It cannot be me because I WILL spend way too much time & gacha bucks in the name of research, but I CAN consult & be your Trainer-san for this, lmao

This is amazing to know, thank you. @procgenkawa.bsky.social was telling me that it was doing some cool simulation stuff but I hadn’t heard the roguelike comparison. Time to try and get a horse girl talk for Roguelike Celebration 2026 🐴

It’s a roguelike??? Like… Balatro style roguelike, cuz quick runs and high randomness? Is there drafting??

I am just generally very proud of how we operate and believe very fiercely in the goal of uplifting the voices of talented people with interesting ideas and experiences to share. Get as many barriers out of the way as possible, and get that knowledge out to share freely.

Other @roguelike.club pros:
- we’ve accommodated time zones as distant as Singapore
- Q&A goes to a bulletin board with upvotes and is moderated, so you always get solid questions
- while the live event isn’t GDC huge, the recorded archive has over 1.5 million views
- the yearly shirts kick ass

Our tickets are $30, or pay what you can. We’re volunteer-run. We don’t have corporate-sponsored talks. And yet, unlike GDC, if you speak at Roguelike Celebration, you’ll get paid! No travel costs! We pay for streaming hardware if you need it! Human transcribed captions, uploaded with no paywall!

A meme of Captain Picard from TNG pointing to something. The caption says "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose your job in gaming. That is not weakness; that is this bullshit industry

Just remembered I had this in my folder

I even had a great moment of “content suspense” recently with Monster Hunter Wilds, when I realized the shocking variety in sizes and models for endemic life. So much extra work to make that, and so easy for a player to never notice! That one surprise makes me pay new attention to my surroundings.

I think Japanese games are often very full of system suspense so it’s especially great. Legend of Zelda is a reference for so many western devs of these games!

Thank you! If I can do anything to make it more accessible, or if there might be ways to involve Japanese designers in conferences such as mine, I’d love to hear it. Language is of course the tricky bit, so great you’re bridging that gap. I’m excited to look into CEDEC and your other links :)

What a great summary, thank you for sharing it :) I believe very strongly in doing our best to share knowledge between game designers around the world, I help run an online conference about roguelikes where that’s one of my main goals (@roguelike.club) I’m glad you found my talk interesting!

A chunky caterpillar on a chewed leaf - it’s yellow, black, blue, and has thin spiky white hairs

A bee hanging from a blue cupped flowers, legs carrying chunks of pollen

Another bee, this one grubbing on some dead leaves

A tiny grasshopper clinging to a blade of grass

The world is hard but it never stops bringing me so much joy and relaxation to just stomp around and take some pictures of bugs.

Deckbuilding with Sets of Cards, in Drafting vs. Constructed – Alexander King's Blog

I've been thinking about an under-utilized design space I wish there were more examples of:
Deckbuilders where you add *sets* of cards to your deck, rather than adding em one by one. So I wrote too much about it:
blog.literallyaking.com/2025/06/12/d...

This seems like it could make for a good lightning talk at Roguelike Celebration! 👀

I’ve never forgotten this picture from 2016 and how it completely reshaped my understanding of how the media covers protests.

If you work for a big company, especially one that would like to gain visibility (and goodwill) with a very smart community of technologists, designers and creative coders, this is a very easy win for your marketing department: an established event, a pretty small ask and direct impact.

🥳🥳🥳❤️