Robert Zubek

"Oh what's this on Steam, a Wholesome Games Celebration of games that 'inspire hope, joy, and introspection'? Don't mind if I do!" he said to himself, and booted up Crusader Kings III.

I have a running theory that the killer app for LLMs is going to be as translators from ambiguous human language to all sorts of formal systems.

E.g. getting an LLM to produce good Prolog code sounds maybe viable?

Ok this was kind of a wild game, and an unexpected collaboration between Firaxis and EA.

Basically you built golf courses for little computer people, and they walked around, played, and judged your designs.

It was great. :)

#GenCon2025: Oh wow, Elements of Game Design is in absolutely stunning company at the MIT Press booth - right between @chaimg.bsky.social 's Building SimCity and @rich-lem.bsky.social 's Playful Production Process, both amazing.

And such a great selection of RPG / D&D books on the upper shelf!

Glad you enjoyed it! :)

You and me both!

Except for me that was the last paper in grad school :)

the actual experts: “it can do at best 20% of the things you’re asking for and of the actual interesting stuff it CAN do which doesn’t take over existing human work, none of your development processes are set up to incorporate that”

Thanks for the reco - it looks really interesting!

Oh yeah that is unexpected!

Yeah, it's a convenient way to get something *kinda like* a fuzzy semantics similarity, but it's definitely not actual semantics, and there's a bunch of non-semantic info mixed in there too (e.g. word morphology).

And now I'm curious if any interesting use cases stand out?

I'm physically in pain reading this article

...and it's such a fantastic, innovative indie visual novel. Ware's quote is right on. Recommended!

And on Saturday I was back at Quimby's buying Book Two because I *had to* learn how this world turns out. :)

(And if you're in Chicago, both Quimby's and Women and Children First have it in stock!)

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters In this debut, which takes the form of a fictional graphic diary, a 10-year-old girl tries to solve a murder. 2025 Whiting Award WINNER in Fiction Kirkus Reviews Best 100 Books of the Century (So Far)...

I was at Quimby's randomly on Friday, and decided to buy My Favorite Thing is Monsters, Book One, mainly because of the quote on the cover ("absolutely astonishing") from Chris Ware whose work I've followed for decades... 1/2

www.fantagraphics.com/products/my-...

No better way to celebrate

Top notch biting satire, no notes :)

Editing a word document in a browser without using Google or Microsoft

What are the European alternatives to Google Docs and Microsoft 365 for students, writers, and project workers?

I couldn't find any good answers, so I have reviewed the four top packages and provided my recommendations. I hope you find it useful!

www.jesperjuul.net/ludologist/2...

WE ALREADY HIT OUR FIRST STRETCH GOAL!! This is madness!!

Just FYI @mitpress.bsky.social this is still happening, but now it's not intermittent anymore. Tested across multiple browsers. Could it be a Cloudflare misconfiguration?

New blog post: Using flow field pathfinding on a voronoi procedurally generated map to simulate 20,000 traders moving around

www.redblobgames.com/blog/2025-05...

Wait what's the JM Jarre connection? 🎹

Murder has a reputational cost though! But there's also disinheriting, or making them join a holy order. Or send them into battle with no support and see what happens. :)

And by the way, if you're curious about the original, you can check out a preview here: mitpress.ublish.com/book/element...

Just wanted to share some awesome news - @mitpress.bsky.social published a Turkish edition of Elements of Game Design!

@mitpress.bsky.social there might be something going on with your web server? mitpress.mit.edu intermittently returns "Error 403 Forbidden" and has been all week - same with individual book URLs.

+1 to CK3, probably the best on-boarding of Paradox Studios games (but - Cities Skylines 2 onboarding is smoother :) ). And the social relationship layer is very compelling.

Same here. The lack of agency sounds right.

That feeling like "the designer has a particular solution in mind that I have to figure out" doesn't feel great, compared to letting me mess around in the world and learn how it works.

Wow that's a terrible change to make.

Also, "dearth of the author" is a really interesting idea (in addition to being a delicious pun), thank you for the paper link!

The AI Researcher's Guide to a Non-Boring Bluesky Feed | Naomi Saphra How to migrate to bsky without a boring feed.

I wrote something up for AI people who want to get into bluesky and either couldn't assemble an exciting feed or gave up doomscrolling when their Following feed switched to talking politics 24/7.

Or if you're not in Chicago, here's a nation-wide map: www.indiebound.org/independent-...

CHI♥BOOKS It was my first time attending, and I had so much fun and felt so involved in the community. I'll definitely be attending again next year. -Almudena R.  We had a great time, and we were able to...

Ooh, it's Independent Bookstore Day!

If you're in Chicago, there's a nice map here: www.chilovebooks.com