Newly discovered Game of Life spaceship looks like a Star Destroyer

conwaylife.com/forums/viewt...

Excited for this. Sy Hersh's memoir "Reporter" was a great read.

What can we learn from breaking down game design to its core elements?

@jzagal.bsky.social joins grokludo this week to talk about the Game Ontology Project - reducing and categorising game design elements to study them piece by piece.

When press releases go terribly right 😄

@mode7games.bsky.social used to send absurd press releases with Monty Python-esque language, and... it's great? I dug up some old ones for Paul to read out loud.

Full ep: www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEl1...

I asked @mode7games.bsky.social about the third-party services & complex architectures forming the "higher end" of difficult end-of-life plans for games.

He contends the language itself is problematic, and trying to account for all scenarios in vague regulation will harm indies most.

Regulation looms over publishers ending support for games - but it might hit indies hardest.

@mode7games.bsky.social tells grokludo about the technical complexities that neither industry nor Stop Killing Games have planned for.

I also got him to read his absurd press releases out loud 😁

"4.2 civic organisations is the amount that in Aus, as a middle-aged man, I'd be in 50 years ago. Currently, statistically, it's zero." 👀

@thegameclub.bsky.social founders on the disappearing civic layer of society, and the health benefits of reconstructing it.

Full ep: youtu.be/oxOASkhi74U

Big city loneliness is a modern paradox that AI companion companies are aggressively marketing to.

@thegameclub.bsky.social has a different take - get people in the same room with shared interests and discussion prompts. Address the problem, not the symptom

Full ep: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxOA...

I asked Tracy Fullerton - author of The Well-Read Game - which games were best to learn "aesthetic readings," bringing ourselves fully to games as art.

She didn't even have to think: @unpackinggame.com and Lost Words.

If you're stuck, just add a ball ⚽

This is the unsolvable problem of live service games - the content treadmill has no offramp, but you can't endlessly add complexity.

Mechabellum took autobattlers in a more Chess-like direction, and as Bearlike says, "You can't keep adding new pieces to your chessboard."

"They're lies. These companies are lying to people."

@chrissimon.au on the idea of infinite storytelling from an AI Dungeon Master, and how a creative human can prompt them away from the mean.

What happens when we outsource to enterprise LLMs for storytelling, & the inherent biases they were trained on start compounding over many quests? 🤔

@chrissimon.au has researched the LLM supply chain and believes its biases will unavoidably creep into game stories & dialogue.

Take that game idea in the back of your head -- how could it communicate its core idea through mechanics and systems, before aesthetics and narrative?

@raphkoster.bsky.social on the difference between thematic experimentation vs mechanical experimentation.

Raph Koster on what it's like for newcomers a galaxy simulating everything. For some reason, emergent disasters make the best stories 😁
@raphkoster.bsky.social @playstarsreach.bsky.social