Discussion: Lest Ye Be Judged

Welcome to the slightly late May newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

You might want to set a limit of a couple of hours for your child, but apparently her friends are allowed to play four hours of Animal Crossing: New Horizons straight. Then there’s the kid who seemingly plays whenever he wants. When he wakes up. When it’s time for lunch. When it’s time for bed. When it’s morning in Tokyo.

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Discussion: The Path to Hell

Welcome to the slightly late April newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

This is anecdotal but it seems, at least in my local middle-class suburbo-bunker, kids are satisfied with a monogame experience that muscles everything else out of the spotlight. These games have successfully harvested the attention of young children and won’t let them go. This makes me sad.

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Discussion: What Sticks

Welcome to the slightly late March newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

But as there are infinite floors in the museum you can keep on deleting forever, falling from one floor to another, again and again, haunted by the same, repeating artworks. You can try throwing yourself out a window but there’s nothing out there to escape to but the infinite white.

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Discussion: The Four-Hour Copy and Paste

Welcome to the slightly late February newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

Now picture the scene. The Depressurizer window is open. It lists every game I own. Each entry is enriched with yummy data like how long I’ve played that game. We’re almost there - all we need to do is copy and paste the data into something else. And this lovely open source project… doesn’t support it.

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Discussion: Selling the Inscrutable

Welcome to the January newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

I’m reminded of a short discussion I had with Jake Birkett at Rezzed when I mentioned how exciting it had been to see so much local multiplayer on show. Birkett couldn’t understand the surge of local multiplayer games because it was such a tricky commercial prospect. If you wanted to forge a successful indie business, why would you get into local multiplayer?

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Discussion: Filter Bubble

Welcome to the December newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

In a strange moment of synchronicity, this troubling thought came to me while I was on a business trip to New York. I realised, unusually, that I could hear the world.

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Discussion: Sausage Souls

Hark! the herald angels sing, "Glory be to the sausage king." Oh yea, I have completed Stephen's Sausage Roll.

I renewed my attack on the Sausage game for the Ouroboros-spinoff book I am working on. I knew I was missing something important and needed to address it. It is likely I'll dedicate a new essay in this book to Stephen's Sausage Roll but I thought it would nice to have a comment thread on it first.

These comments will be sausages all the way down and completely naked. There will be no ROT13 here.

I mean, if you like playing puzzles and you're wondering whether to play Stephen's Sausage Roll, here's my capsule review:

• What a rush

If you want some detail, rando who is planning to play Stephen's Sausage Roll:

• Be prepared for the occasional bottleneck, particularly The Great Tower
• Do not judge a book by its first world, you're really playing for what the game becomes
• It is a hard game but in a satisfying way
• There are a handful of what feel like Monte Carlo levels (e.g. Wobblecliff) but generally you think the levels out, not guess
• Do not read this thread or go looking for spoilers, because someone will spoil Dead End
• You do not spoil Dead End
• No, you really do not

Anyway, I think it's time to hand over to the comments.

Discussion: Fetch Quests For A Dead World

Welcome to the teensy-weensy-late October newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

You end up wandering back and forth all the time, taking an object here and an object there. It doesn’t feel like you’re solving puzzles - it feels like you’re fulfilling fetch quests for a dead world.

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Discussion: ELIZA[0]

Welcome to the September newsletter (sign up if you want to read it):

The developer’s best asset is the player, as prestige text adventure purveyor Infocom suggested in their advertising back in the 1980s. “OUR STORIES LACK IMAGINATION,” they proudly proclaimed. “Because Infocom's interactive fiction is designed to run on your imagination.”

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