Robert Zubek

Oh that is interesting, and especially looking back at that very difficult period of time - which keeps reverberating, even though chronologically it's way in the past.

Looking forward to reading!

Whoa didn't know you have a new book out!

E.g. in City of Gangsters we explicitly wanted to be able to produce stories of illicit business deals but also betreyal and revenge, and this drove systems design.

Each game will have its own stories of course! But starting with stories is a powerful technique.

As game devs were used to thinking of player experience and flow, and then back solving for systems and mechanics.

Similarly with social sims, but starting with stories (experienced first hand), and then back solving for systems that can generate those.

Yes, exactly this:

We'll be announcing the AIIDE'25 keynotes in the next couple of weeks and our first one to announce is this really exciting look at applying research work in industry from @luked.bsky.social and Nadine Perez!

Interesting that they released it to the public, and not just to partners

To celebrate over 20 years of AAIDE we want to highlight our Best Paper winners so far!

Every week we will add one to this thread until we've caught up 👾

That is amazing news. Congratulations to the whole team!

"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. :)