Okay so @defector.com has had an odd glitch since the site redesign a couple of weeks back where the wrong photo and headline are often put together on the main page and I was going to ask them about fixing it but this just happened and as far as I'm concerned they have to leave it as is.

How do you get around the "some of my follows just post too much" issue? Like I have to scroll half an hour to get through the most recent 2 hours of posts. A lot of my friends' updates that are just buried under way too much stuff

There is something weird in those videos showing the most trivial details in a game with subtitles like "when devs actually care" It feels like an appropriation of care where care is only recognized when it has observable and material results

First hour of Perfect Tides: Station to Station I'm already a fan of the game

Touring China currently: It is genuinely fascinating how accepted genAI works are in official venues like museums and broadcasting. AI videos also have a noticable subliminal aesthetics, which works well for exhibitions that aims to celebrate land and history.

Some people rhink being an academic is somehow related to universities, but no, it is about the distance between an opinion you hate and one you will fight for. An academic thrives in an environment of incredibly precise micrometer-thin nuances of raging disapproval and delight.

Introverts do love to gatekeep their introversion sometimes

Incredible essay. Stupidity is not ignorance, but a false sense of closure. I love the point about subaltern speaking not being enough. The point is now to disturb the system that makes "the refusal of Palestinian humanity feel like a carefully considered position" www.equator.org/articles/mor...

Gaza and the Problem of Moral Stupidity • EQUATOR

Forty years after Edward Said demanded ‘permission to narrate’, the truth from Palestine has never been more widely known. And yet the annihilation continues.

equator.org

There's something infectious about how the theater tunes you into life's rhythm, like just how everything can have a sense of timing to how they move.

The more I read about indexicality the more confused I am

Wrote a little goodbye to the game that could until it couldn't bjarke.it/article/good... See you on June 9th.

If game journalism becomes more woke, the Mixtape controversy wouldn't happen because there'd be fewer reviewers resonating with its white suburban nostalgic vibe

I've laughed waaaaaay more at this than I should have.

Although Lorelei and the Laser Eyes can drag in places, I still really admire the game for its craft of integrating the story with the puzzles. Frequent references to key events, confusions between fiction/realities, character building in the puzzles etc. A lot of tricks that deserve studying.

Be Gay. Do Crime. Hit Kids.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes does a neat thing where the years of events are codes for ~50% the puzzles, so the puzzle part is figuring out how the same code is represented this time. And the repetition of number also slowly points your curiosity to what events those numbers refer to.

Really enjoy this podcast on @acidhorizon.bsky.social Digital theory has some presence in game studies but I never paid much attention but this new essay collection feels like a good entry. youtu.be/xIDlnjzFYwM

'Digital Theory' Panel Discussion: Is Theory Itself Digital? (Fazi, Galloway, Weatherby, Handleman)

YouTube video by Acid Horizon

youtu.be

I'm still in the tutorial sequence but the way that it deeply explores the thematic and narrative implications of the mechanics is imo incredibly inspired

Not The A.V. Club Games@nottheavclubgames.bsky.social · 9mo ago

In its wedding of mechanical complexity and narrative justification, Pathologic 3 undoes oft-touted binaries of story and play. www.avclub.com/pathologic-3...

A game design for evoking reflection is to draw attention to the constructed nature of the game goal: Romero's Train, and Consume Me, Rhythm Doctor do it in narrative beats But I'm always surprised how often those moments and thus themes are missed that are often so evident to critics and academics

It's a crime that folks aren't more aware Pathologic 3 is coming out in <10 hours

Finished Consume Me. Really enjoy the presentation, the sheer ambition and love behind it. Clever narrative touches through Florence-esque interactions and cultural critiques thru game logic. But at the same time I feel that its system is a bit overdesigned for its larger thematic goal (cont...)

I enjoy the latest Wong Kar-Wai for the business drama (surprisingly) and that it is mostly in Shanghainese, contrasting China's past of Mandarin standadization But the article is correct, Wong's style feels substanceless in the show, almost tangential to the script compared to the classics

The Baffler@thebaffler.com · 10mo ago

Wong Kar-Wai may be Hong Kong’s slickest, sultriest auteur, but the series he made for mainland Chinese television may leave western audiences bleary with neon. Xiao Yue Shan looks for cultural substance beneath the economic gloss.

Recommend the whole blog post, but there's a chess analogy in there that's interesting (obligatory @spizelo.bsky.social), where a specific game chess, rather than games like D&D, are used as models for scientific knowledge (I suggest D&D because it defines game rules very differently).

Julian Togelius@togelius.bsky.social · 10mo ago

was at an event on AI for science yesterday, a panel discussion here at NeurIPS. The panelists discussed how they plan to replace humans at all levels in the scientific process. So I stood up and protested that what they are doing is evil. Full post: togelius.blogspot.com/2025/12/plea...

In normal academic writing, we use brief discussions of games to help us make a point. Writing a whole book about ACNH instead gave me an opportunity to explore complex, ambivalent experiences with the game — some of which I recently got to talk about with Emily Cerf news.ucsc.edu/2025/12/anim...

Ahead of new game release, Animal Crossing: New Horizons book reflects on comfort, community, and capitalism

Professor of Computational Media Noah Wardrip-Fruin speaks on themes explored in his new book

news.ucsc.edu

😶‍🌫️ Remecarving: or, Forgettings a collection of 829 computational poems, each depicting the gradual algorithmic *forgetting* of a sentence found in Wikipedia that exhorts the reader to remember last-minute entry for NaNoGenMo 2025! github.com/NaNoGenMo/20...

EXCLUSIVE: So far it's been unclear what proof Rockstar Games has to justify its firing of 34 union members, who it claims were leaking "confidential information in a public forum". PMG has now seen some of the messages which contributed to this decision being made. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TvW...

The Messages Rockstar Saw Before Firing 34 Union Members

YouTube video by People Make Games

youtube.com

Haven't read the paper yet but in my experience LLM is just terrible at picking up what makes writers actually proud of their work like proses, themes and very tailored moments of obfuscation and reveal. Glad there's a study on it now!

Noah Wardrip-Fruin@n-w-f.bsky.social · 11mo ago

"[Writers] preferred inspiration outside generated content and did not find the proposed collaborative work with LLMs enjoyable or fulfilling." ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/112...

A sneak peek at the cover of next week’s issue, which celebrates Zohran Mamdani’s historic win. #NewYorkerCovers https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/451hFM

Rather beautifully, Professor Mahmood Mamdani's dedication in "Neither Settler Nor Native" is to his trail-blazing son, @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social. He quotes the revolutionary Chinese writer Lu Xun's famous concluding lines in "Hometown": 「其實地上本沒有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。」 -魯迅，故鄉 #everynightapoem

eileen chengyin chow@chowleen.bsky.social · 2y ago

“Imagine an iron house, with absolutely no windows, indestructible, with many people asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation…Would you think you are doing them a good turn [by waking them before they perish]?” “But if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope.” Lu Xun

It's a good time to write a book about a single game/series! There's the great work being published by @bossfightbooks.com And now three of the best scholarly presses have joined in ...