The other weekend, I went away with five friends¹ to a house near Clacton in Essex², to spend the weekend playing "the wizard game" – otherwise known as The Seven Part Pact. Here is a summary of the experience: It was enjoyable, but it was also a lot.

What is The Seven Part Pact? It's a tabletop roleplaying game by Jay Dragon, which is currently in development (but drafts are available on her Patreon), but which has a reputation for being... let's say maximalist. It's a game which simulates much more stuff than a roleplaying game ought to try to simulate, but it manages to get away with this by dividing this labour up among the players - each player is simultaneously roleplaying a wizard who specialises in a certain aspect of the world, playing what amounts to a solo boardgame which simulates that aspect of the world, and acting as a DM for the other players, focused on certain mechanics and themes. These roles naturally overlap.

Which means you can play a roleplaying game where the game state tracks which faction is ascendant at court, the trade routes with a neighbouring kingdom, the emergence of a prophet in a impoverished temple, a renegade unauthorised occultist causing disturbances in the balance of magic, the grand fated destiny of a humble teenager born to farmers, and a bunch of other things besides... and all of this can happen simultaneously while the game proceeds at something approximating a reasonable pace. Now, you might think "why would I want this?", and that is a fair question. And if you're thinking that... don't play the game. But personally, my main thought was instead: "wait, can that really work?". And, the answer to that is, yeah, it does work. Not all of the time, sometimes there is too much detail and you are scrambling through 3 PDFs to find out how this one thing works, and oh, I forgot about... But often enough, all the gears mesh together, and you get a beautiful sequence where an event in one domain can trigger events in others, and those events are realised as things happening to these little fake people you care about, and then the wizards see those things happening and double down with their own bad choices on top of that, and the whole system, the whole world, feels alive. And then it's a glorious thing, something larger and stranger than I've ever experienced in a tabletop game before.

But, of course, there are the times when it isn't all meshing together... it took us hours and hours to read enough and understand enough to get going. And when it was going it still ended up moving quite slowly, a lot of the time. And even when it was moving... well, normally playing a tabletop game is reasonably mentally strenuous, whether you're GMing or roleplaying. And in this, you were generally doing, well, let's say one and a half of GMing, roleplaying, or boardgaming at any one moment. And, of course, you're moving between those roles, which means you're constantly context switching. We had a little break on Saturday evening and I had to go have a little lie down while my head stopped aching from all the exertion I was putting it through. Even though a lot of the details happen within other people's boards, for there to be a sense of a shared world, you do ultimately need to know a lot of what's going on with other people. It asks a lot from you!

In total, I think we got through 6 months of the game. Something like that? Friday night we got set up, understood it enough to get going. Saturday we played through from 11 am til 11:30 pm. Sunday, something like 11 am til 4 pm. A few breaks for food but honestly we were at the table for the vast majority of that time. Which means that each round took us like two and half hours to get through. And I mean, I am generally someone who gets sceptical if a boardgame advertises longer than a 45 minute play time, so...

But then, Josh was giving us a lift back to the station, racing to catch the train after we played out the finale... and that good froth was happening. Remember this thing, remember that thing, remember when you did this and then it caused that for me, and then of course that was the reason that X happened much later on. Oh, wow, yeah, I guess the Devil really did cause all that to happen. What a tragic end for such-and-such, after all of this stuff. What do you think happened after? And so on. Which is really the marker of a good time playing.

¹ it would have been 6, but Ada was sick
² well okay, Josh lives in the house, so I guess he didn't go anywhere

Okay, I feel too tired to try to weave the rest of this into a coherent narrative, so you're getting some scattered thoughts and scraps from here on out.

Starting with: who are the wizards?

• the Warlock, me - I am at court, watching factions jockey for power and enact their agendas when they gain power. I don't have so much of a sense of impending crisis - if only one faction becomes dominant then the king will be deposed and there's some big consequences, but otherwise it's a little simulation that bubbles along producing NPCs which I can meddle with at will. Until a noble decides to do something stupid and causes a big problem, anyway.

• The Faustian, Matt - he had a bunch of different locations where the Devil might cause problems, represented by face down playing cards. To deal with these, he has to try to recruit agents to thwart those problems. And also to thwart the agents of the Devil. And then if he fails, then those problems ripple out onto other people. And all along the way, he's running low on his deck of cards, and the Devil's deck gets deeper - which represents the way he is inevitably and inexorably getting consumed by the Devil. Losing weeks at a time to the Devil's whims, until there's nothing human left - and then, hopefully, we all get together to kill him. That's the best case scenario.

• The Heirophant, Arlo - this game is about maintaining temples and making sure there are enough resources to feed pilgrims. Trying to attract patrons, trying to repel prophets. Arlo played this as a funny little guy who was constantly offering everyone soup.

• The Mariner, Josh - trade relationships and storms. And when those got out of control, gigantic mythic beasts. For a long time Josh was like "this is all totally under control, kinda boring really". And then it very much wasn't, and suddenly we had kaiju everywhere.

• The Sorceror, Chloe - every time we cast magic, we left traces on his little diagram. And also any time an occultist NPC did. And then the Sorcerer had to go find them and mop them up. Both the traces and also the occultists. And if he didn't... magic would start going wrong? somehow? tbh I was always unclear what the lose condition entailed here, Chloe would sometimes just say things like "just so you know, thaumaturgy is now chaotic" and we'd all nod and say "okay, good to know" in grave tones and then continue casting just as much magic as we always would have.

• The Necromancer, Fi - every time someone died, they would appear at the gates of death. Then they needed to be shepherded towards an afterlife. Although from what I heard, being the Necromancer was maybe less about shepherding and more about fighting the monsters of the land of death? And generally stopping them from moving back along the gates and popping back up in the land of the living. Because when they did... they would appear as horrifying undead monstrosities. And then we'd have to fight them.

• and there was also The Sage, who would have been Ada if she didn't have the flu. He is about managing dreams and destinies – but I didn't see him in action so I don't really know how that would work. Something about the balance between nightmare and delirium?? I mean... I still don't really know the details for everyone else's roles, they were not really my business. Just that they could cause problems for me, and I could cause problems for them. That was enough.

So, let's have an example of these interconnected systems. A nice frothy one. A princess climbed her way up into the King's inner circle, and nagged him enough that he found her a husband. And when a princess marries, the wedding is obviously a big deal. So naturally all the wizards were invited. Not all of them showed up – some had various crises to deal with. But the Sorceror was one of the ones who did show their face. As important guests, they were given a present by the King - and it was up to me to decide what would be a fitting gift for each wizard. The Sorceror needed help spotting traces of magic, so we decided to give him a baby hippogriff, which I suggested he could then slaughter to read the entrails and reveal some traces. To be clear, this was just invention on my part - I wanted to give something vaguely useful (a lot of traces to clear) but also flavourful (we are evil wizards). So the Sorceror went home with the baby creature, and some time later did indeed kill it and reveal some magic traces. Great. Except then, a little while later, the Mariner decided a giant beast needed to come into existence on the Sorceror's isle, probably as result of him mismanaging the storms or whatever. And what better beast to spawn than the parent hippogriff, come to avenge its child. Uh oh. The Sorceror considered facing down and defeating the hippogriff - but decided he was better off just shoving it along to someone else. I can't really remember who, because whoever they were, they just shoved it along again, and again and again, until almost all of us had had the hippogriff for a hot sec. It finally ended up in the Graven Isles where the Necromancer lives. Just... fucking up shit for a month or two while the Necromancer did other stuff. I think he was trying to deal with the spooky reincarnated murdered princess we had? Anyway, defeating that hippogriff ended up being one of the final battles of the game, destroying the temple that the Heirophant had recently set up on the Graven Isles.

A beautiful moment - Chloe as the Sorceror, battling the undead remnants of their former master (yep, more undead beasties, blame the Necromancer). The former master was equipped with a treasure gifted from the Devil - we went through the suggested options and agreed that the ideal thing would be a crown which causes all who behold the wearer to see him as rightful ruler of the entire world. The Sorceror faced up against his former master, terrified of the magic he might unleash. So he struck first, casting a spell compelling him to silence (the critical words of power, the ones the spell pivoted around were "shut up"). There was some pretty pathetic fighting - try to slice with a magic dagger, get knocked back, slice, block, slice, block. The undead master seemed to be on the verge of winning, until the Sorceror gathered himself, and in a burst of power and frustration he cast another binding spell. In the whiniest possible voice he commanded his former master: "let me have this".

So he did. He retreated from the battlefield, knife in back, crown handed over. And now the Sorceror was left with unfathomable power in the mortal world... and the deep, sick knowledge that he had gained it in a truly pathetic way.

(Later, when the spell had worn off, the undead master returned. He cast a spell upon the ghouls crowding around, and on the former wife of the Sorceror, and on himself, and he formed them all up into a monstrous being of flesh, a kaiju agglomeration of life here to seek revenge. And when we looked up the tables for the outcomes of the roll, we found that it was in fact a committed pacifist. So it just... hung around, cluttering up the place. Great ending.)

In the game, we all have a phrase we are responsible for reminding the other players of throughout play. Mine was "All Wizards Are Men", and I was in charge of enforcing the masculinity of the wizards we were playing - reminding other players to play their characters with masculinity, that we are part of a patriarchy, and that what being a man in the patriarchy means is that you need to maintain your position within it, and that violence is a tool for maintaining your position. I would say that the game is not especially interested in the ways that masculinity can be a positive force. To take a little excerpt from my character creation:

You are a man, as all Wizards are. However within your heart you know:

☐ To be a man is to be a leader and dominate over others, and you are always at the beck and call of your master.
☐ To be a man is to be a chivalrous hero, and yet this world has no more room for heroes, and chivalry is an easy way to a pathetic death.
☐ Some deep-set part of you is repulsed by your maleness, and so you double down into a crueler and harsher version of masculinity.
☐ There is some part of you which is kind and caring and distinctly feminine, but you must guard that part of your heart from the violence of your job, and only show it to those closest to you.
☐ You were once a woman, but you had no choice but to kill that part of you, and reject the weakness of femininity in order to serve the King.
☐ No one dares speculate on your manhood. You would kill the next person to make such a claim in front of you.
☐ There is an even greater secret, which is for you and you alone.

(I picked "Some deep-set part of you is repulsed by your maleness, and so you double down into a crueler and harsher version of masculinity.", in case you were wondering)

This is, honestly, a rule that's a little difficult to enforce on other players without overriding some of their character choices, but I tried by giving a big thumbs up whenever someone did something especially toxic in a masculine way. Petty name-calling in the interests of jockeying for status: 👍 Physically threatening someone: 👍 Getting angry: 👍 Overcompensating for a sense of self-loathing: 👍👍.

A bit of game design which nicely dovetails this is the theme that the player who plays the Heirophant is responsible for enforcing: "All Wizards Are Lonely", which ends up getting into the rules for a wizard's companions. Yes, of course a wizard has companions - they are so important and busy and focused on their Grand Works, how could they otherwise make sure that their laundry is done, their households are run, they have intellectual companionship, that their physical safety is enforced? If they had to do all that labour themselves, well, it would take up so much time that they wouldn't have any time for their important wizard business. And to be clear, the game makes both of these literally and mechanically true - their wizard business is important, and they would use up all their time caring for themselves if they didn't have NPCs to maintain this for them.

I give all this context as a way of introducing the absolute shit I played within this game. His name was "The Serpent" (a nickname he acquired at court), and he was... well, the centre of gravity for the Warlock is a prideful man of war, but I steered away from this, and so he was more of a slimy Grand Vizier type. The other players described him, several times, as "a walking collection of red flags". What were some of these red flags? Well, in character creation, I was asked to figure out who my companions were. I had to assign NPCs to the following four roles:

Your daily life, ensuring your quarters are kept clean, your vestments are prepared, and only the finest foods will touch your plate. (Earth)
A wife, Annelise, from an arranged marriage - the arrangement was: the prestige of my birth for her family money. We started the game estranged, but I spent a little time halfway through persuading her into returning to court from her family estate. Not with any emotional appeal, but with the new status that I had acquired, and which she would be able to share in, if she returned (to run my household for me).

Your emotional life, comforting you when your thoughts turn violent, keeping your bed warm each night, and washing your scars with herbal baths. (Water)
I spent a little time looking through the options, and then I thought of an option, and then I decided it was a little too messed up. And then I decided it was too messed up to not use. So I assigned this role to my prentice. A teenager who signed up to learn to be a wizard, and instead ended up the victim of sexual and emotional abuse by an older man. He never actually ended up getting a name, or indeed having any influence on the external world. Poor kid.

Your private life, guarding your keep from spies and assassins, concealing your emotions from the outside world, and ensuring your secrets never leave this room. (Air)
A squad of soldiers I was close to. They did a little smuggling, to which I turned a blind eye. This is honestly the least fucked up of all of these relations.

Your creative life, providing conversation late into the night, practice with both strategy and physical skill, and stimulating conversation on the nature of power. (Fire)
Ah, this is Alia. Alia, my lover. Alia who, before the game started, I used magic to show a glimpse of the lands of the dead. The first use of magic among the Pact for many years, but anything to impress a girl. Alia, who I spent time spying on, to discover her secrets in case I needed to blackmail her later, and discovered: she was performing magic on her own! Alia who put pressure on me to teach her magic, more and more magic. Alia, my little secret, the knowledge of whom - that a woman might be doing magic, that a member of the Pact might be abetting this - would so upset all of the rest of the Pact, turn them all against me at a stroke. Alia, who all along was the mistress of the King. Alia, who murdered the Queen. Alia who, reclining in comfort in the Queen's quarters shortly after, defeated the returned revenant of the Queen in hand to hand combat. Alia whom, soon after, lost her throne when the King was assassinated and I was his heir and ascended with my legal wife and Queen. Alia, my lover still, upset and insecure at court, demoted, back to mistress-hood, still yearning for more magic. Alia who, seduced by the prospect of seeing magic done openly, joined me when I sailed upon the other wizards. Alia, who died ignominiously with the rest when the armada was almost completely obliterated by a single strike from the sky, too swift to see coming.

And all along, the other players were asking - did I not resent the fact that a woman in my court, a woman in my life, could do magic? Surely there is some resentment there, that a woman could do this thing that only men ought? And all along I said - The Serpent is fine with it up until the very point at which she does not depend upon my guidance, the point at which she can exist openly as a magician, the point at which she does not need my protection and approval. Beyond that point - beyond that point I will strike her down, I will abuse her, I will force her back into a lesser position. But up until that point, all her wit and intelligence were as like music to my ears. All her glory was my glory. My sweet Alia. Emphasis on the "my".

Anyway, I was thinking of the dynamics of The Serpent when I saw the following post:

(I then went looking for a pithy quote actually from Arendt saying the same to use instead of a post paraphrasing her, but failed. Maybe I should actually read On Violence? Anyway. It's a good point.)

And, yeah, that's exactly his deal. He's good at getting his way at court, and with the people in his life. When I was asked – why didn't you threaten Annelise to get her to come back, why did you apologise to her? – it was because he knew he could get what he wanted without it. But the threat of violence is always there... and if power, the kind of power that he thinks he deserves, slips out of his hands, he immediately goes to violence to reclaim it. How did that go for him? Well, I mean, ultimately pretty badly. He saw the Crown of the World on the head of the Sorceror and he flipped out. How dare?! He's the King. He did a deal with the Devil to get time away from court obligations, he suborned Alia and the rest onto ships, and he sailed them towards the meeting place of the wizards. Whereupon they were obliterated entirely by a wizardly bolt from above, the seas vaporized, devastating tsunamis everywhere. He survived, though, protected by magic - only to find himself, close to death, drowning at the bottom of a scalding ocean. A death-reflex gave him space for a final spell - so he attempted to transform into a sea-serpent, ready to wreak revenge. Anyway, it went wrong and now he's stuck as a weird fish guy. Without any hands to magic himself back into a different form. Womp womp. And that's about where we left it when we had to run for our train. A man consumed by a jealous rage, destroying everything and everyone he loves in an attempt to protect his ego (only his ego, everything else is fine), only to be left in the ruins of his life and his body.

Like I say, this game has a lot to say about masculinity, but not much of it is positive.

Some fun bits of roleplaying from the other players:

• Arlo constantly talking about soup. Somehow you'd expect it to be an optional bit of their character they'd picked up on, but no, the Heirophant always starts with the ability to make soup. Soup.
• Fi doing a necromancer voice by making a horrible "erghhh" sound before saying something almost completely normally. Remained funny throughout.
• all of Chloe's stuff with the ex-master, as detailed above. But also, counterpoint, being the spooky little ghost girl who just wanted justice for her murder... by which she meant she wanted like 20 people killed.
• Josh immediately coming in with childish nicknames for everyone. I definitely did a little mental loop of: Wait, he's calling me "The Derpent"? That's not even good! God this is so annoying, my guy is way scarier than... ah, yes, this is working perfectly. 👍

Oh, yeah, so the turn structure. What were we doing each turn that took us two to three hours? The turns work like this:

• you look to the stars. There's an Orrery in the middle of the map (yes it's a physical place you can visit), which shows the position of the stars. Mercury in conjunction with Venus in Capricorn, that stuff. Anyway, first you move the stars around the sky and advance the position of the sun to represent the new month.
• then you all go to your little boardgames and look up what these new stars mean for you. This bit was most involved for me - it determined who advanced at court, and who arrived or left. And, of course, once a year there's a birthday party for the King which everyone needs to attend. I then also had to enact the agendas of the King's inner circle, a cascading series of things they want to happen. And then you resolve all the outflowing consequences from that - like, once the Queen has her first two agendas met, then her final wish is to give another wizard a gift - so I'd need to pick a wizard and invent a gift to give him. I was usually still frantically working my way through this stuff when everyone else had moved onto the next stage

• now you plan out your month. Fill up your diary! This is literalised by putting your little tokens on various places on the table, each representing a place you spend a week of time this month. You also have a scene token - you put this somewhere you want to play out a scene. Some stuff (like casting magic in an improvised fashion) can only be done within a scene. There's a heavy hint that you probably want to end your month going to the Wizardmoot, and talking to your fellow wizards and finding out what stuff is going on in their domains. But if stuff is reaching crisis point, you might not have time (if stuff is reaching crisis point, asking fellow wizards for help might be especially helpful). And if you really need to get more done in the month than you have time for... well, you can always ask the Devil for a favour...
• and now finally, all the prep is done. Play goes around the table, and people do the things that they said they'd do (if the thing you said you'd do no longer makes sense... tough titty). If it's a normal token, then you just say what you're doing ("I'm pushing a storm away", "I'm spying on the King's Mistress to learn her secret", "I'm deploying an agent in the Blue City", "I'm attending a holy day", "I'm spending time with my wife because we're on the outs", "I'm gonna make a magic cloak"). Sometimes this has Consequences for another player, and then you resolve that stuff. Sometimes it can get complicated, if stuff cascades a bit.
• if the thing you're doing is something that someone has placed a scene marker on... then you play out the scene. Hey look, we found the roleplaying! Other players jump in to play NPCs – sometimes they have a speciality, like an undead NPC is probably gonna be played by the Necromancer, or a companion is probably gonna be played by the Heirophant. But also, anyone can jump in if they feel like they're keen for it. And sometimes in the scene they end up having a big fight, or they end up casting a bunch of magic spells, or something else with particular mechanics. There's special rules for that, so the player in charge of magic (Sorceror) or fights (Warlock, which was me), or whatever, then runs through how that works and probably leads on any choices needed for that.
• you keep going round, taking actions and removing your scene markers, until there's only the Wizardmoot left to do. Then you play that out - I think we always ended up having at least once scene marker there. Just a nice argument to round off the month.
• and after that, maybe there's a bit of end-of-turn processing to do - I think the Faustian especially had this. You know, when the Devil's schemes are revealed, that often causes some Consequences.
• and then... go make a cup of tea, stretch your legs, stare into the middle distance for a sec. And then go again.

Theoretically you could predict what the stars would be in the next month, figure out what consequences would be coming up for you, and then plan your month accordingly. Or spend a little time to meddle with the stars themselves and push a planet backwards and forwards, to escape something horrible happening. And potentially cause something horrible for someone else.

A nice thing about this structure is that it does try to put a lot of the heavy crunchy thinking into a place where it can be done in parallel. Figuring out how the stars affect you & planning what you're gonna do about it is the time when you're most focused in on your aspect of the game, and all of that happens in mostly-parallel. A little bit of - oh, Fi, I have a Consequence for you if you're ready for it - but mostly just - oh, right, so the Champion gets his agenda, yes, okay, a duel happens, okay, and next I need to...

On the duration - I am reminded of going to see the film Park Lanes last year (Letterboxd review here) - it's 8 hours long, and once something becomes a durational experience then the idea of the length becomes one of the dominant parts of the experience. Just committing to a film for 8 hours is a Thing. Planning for it, psyching yourself up for it, wondering about your stamina. The feeling around that, the way it lifts you out of normal experience - this is a big part of residential larps, as well. Anyway, on this - I guess my favourite part of this whole experience was actually the way that the gang of us all got on and were cracking jokes outside of the game. Very pleasant group of people to go away to do a stupid thing with. Very pleasant to commit to a stupid big thing. I recommend it, in whatever form your stupid big things take.

At the start someone said... I haven't done that much tabletop and I'm intimidated by all you experts. And also I have a tendency to get silly very quickly. And I responded by saying... I also actually haven't done that much, but I have a tendency to stay serious.

Which is I think something you can see with the characterisation - I went much more grim with my character than some of the others. I don't think any of their characters were sexually abusing anyone. But I also took part in (what others called) the funniest scene of the game, when Matt (as the Faustian) called me (as one of his NPCs, a starving artist roped into plotting against the Devil) for a pep call. He was trying to level me up from an artist into a henchman, and I think what made it funny was that I played it completely straight. Yes, I'm taking notes - I should work out. Am I going for max load or many reps? Both, okay, sure, writing that down. What's my training schedule, how many rest days? None, okay great. And you say I shouldn't keep on painting? Yes, I'm still taking notes, you say my colour theory is excreable... sure, okay, that's disappointing, but I hear you.

I'm curious what the tone would have been if Ada had come, I feel like she's also a little more serious, like me. But also... the game accommodated a range of tones. I could go grim & other people could go silly and it worked as a motley crew of wizards who don't especially want to work with each other, but don't have much choice.

I referred to it a little up top, but this is very much a work in progress. There's the effort of loading up all the complicated rules into your head... and then there's also the extra mental load of doing it with docs that are half finished. Chloe even did a great metafictional bit where their character referred to knowledge of "Page XX", a common placeholder within the codexes. But, on the Friday, we ended the night in despair after one player discovered that they had been looking at the wrong version of their rules the whole time, and that's why none of it had made sense to them. Probably the lowest point of the game – like, can we actually make sense of this, is it worth carrying on if it's just gonna be upsetting, and not even upsetting for good reasons. (It was fine with a night's sleep and a bit of time to look at the much more comprehensible, correct, rules)

And, like, so much printing. I think you could use a whole sheaf of printer paper just printing out the current set of docs. And they do, imo, benefit from being printed. Or else I hope you have a good system for flicking through multiple PDFs and annotating them...

There's the game we played (the game you could play, yourself), and then there's the game that you can imagine with many months of work on editing passes and graphic design and quick references and polished materials. A properly printed edition, with colour coding & binding & quick reference sheets! If this game is an exercise in trying to make an impossible quantity of complexity actually manageable by human brains... well, I think the current form does not quite succeed. But I think that that potential future version might. The one that would probably cost far too much to produce. Or maybe it would just use that latitude to cram in even more complexity. I don't know if I would be mad if it did?

Oh, yeah, becoming King. I did it when I (as a player) thought it would be funny after the Sorceror got the magic crown. Good drama to become King and then discover yr pal is already a bigger King than you! So I started doing actual strategy to see how to make it happen. Projecting the stars forward and whatnot. And then I discovered that on the start of the next turn, I was gonna flip a coin to see if the King was gonna get assassinated or not. And when I did... he did! ( and we consulted together and decided it was funniest if it wasn't me wot dunnit). I happened to be on the Heir spot when that happened, so I became the King. There's a little section on it in my rules! It says (I paraphrase): you can do this, but also you might find it sucks. And it kind of does! When you're not King then you start your turn by turning over agendas and finding out what the people in the court want, the King makes it happen, and then you take your moves. When you're King, you start the turn by looking at people's agendas, and then you spend your turn actually making that shit happen. No choice! Sucks! I got other things to do!

Like, with Alia - she got mad at me for not making the time to teach her magic. But all my time was taken up with unavoidable court business - including carrying out her agenda and recruiting a lady knight to the court. But she was still mad! Such bullshit!

(Such wonderfully flavoursome bullshit, and a great game design twist to make becoming King not become too tempting)

Anyway, it was all worth it in order to set the Serpent off on his doomed quest for honour. But I would have tried to wriggle out of it if I didn't know the game was drawing to a close...

I just passed my driving theory test! Here are some thoughts on the experience:

• the worst part was the grim vibes of all the anti cheating stuff they do. Demonstrating that your phone is fully powered off (before putting it in a locker). Not being able to take my own tissue in, but having to use their scratchy one. A colour coded system of chairs for different bits of waiting. Showing the insides of your ears so they can check them for hidden devices. Signing your name while they hold the signature on your driving license out of sight. Having to stare at the CCTV to demonstrate that they have told you it exists (?). And the whole thing is in a grim run down office building with a busted buzzer, run by an outsourced company... but for all that, the staff were pleasant enough and it ran pretty efficiently.
• the hardest part was sitting down in the chair in the quiet and immediately feeling very sleepy. I ended up having to do some quiet wiggling between the multiple choice bit and the hazard perception bit to wake up a little. This is supposed to be stressful! Where is my adrenaline???

Oh wait, I should explain the format for people who aren't familiar. First there's a multiple choice thing, like 50 questions about trailer load limits and, yes, you should give cyclists room when you pass them. And then there's a bit where you're shown 14 drivers-eye clips of footage and you have to click whenever something happens that constitutes a hazard. Which here means "that the car in the clip will be forced to take evasive action". I've been revising for both bits with an app which shows you the official revision questions. Spaced repetition for the first over a few weeks, and for the second I have crammed in an hour or two of practice at clicking at the right kind of frequency to catch the hazards early but also not get disqualified for clicking too much.

Anyway, I got one question wrong on the multiple choice (not to brag!) and 56 out of 75 for the hazard perception (44 is the pass mark). I think this mostly comes down to being someone who is good at understanding what the sensible answer to click on multiple choice questions is. And also from being someone who has been a road user (on a bicycle) for multiple decades.

And now I have passed it I can now book my practical test, which is where you drive the actual car. I think my plan now is that I will book that for the soonest available appointment, which will about six months away, and then I will see if I can find a driving instructor to teach me how to drive before the appointment actually happens. Maybe an intensive course in the week or so beforehand, just to really cram it in.

Anyway, back to the review:

• the most memorable part was the beautiful aesthetics of the CGI for the hazard perception bit. It's not the biggest budget CGI, but it's aiming for this real sense of verisimilitude for very everyday English streets and roads. Which is something I'm kind of obsessed with depictions of, because you see it so rarely. A particular quality to bay windows, grey skies, cracked paving slabs. These animations had such attention to this kind of detail... I remember some slightly wonky adverts in the window of a Coral betting shop, beautifully tufted grass on verges, people animated to have an argument in a car park, reflections in windows that I thought showed a glimpse of the car I was supposed to be driving... honestly all this beautiful work was quite distracting from focusing on, like, spotting hazards.
• the cutest part was when the hazard was two geese that were crossing the road. They did the little tail wag as they waddled across.
• the most satisfying part was when the video with two hazards... had both of those hazards being a group of sheep wandering into the road. Like, yes, you're driving through a field with sheep, likely enough they'll wander into the road twice in short succession. They only do one video with two hazards, so it's fun to confound expectations by making it one where you respond to the same hazard twice.
• the most cinematic part was when they really tried to establish at it was a windy day. Leaves swirling, a rag tied to a van fluttering... real storytelling. And then you turn onto a big bridge and there's a cyclist! They're getting pushed around by the gusts, they going all over the shop. They get in front of the van in front, which has to brake, and then that's your hazard. Storytelling!

Anyway, they release a bunch of practice videos for you to practice with - I think they're licensed to particular apps? I've only seen them on my phone screen, but maybe I'll try to seek them out to watch them Large. There's one explanatory one on YouTube I found, you can see a little of the aesthetic quality here:

The videos are done by Jellylearn - they write a little about their process:

The clip below was launched prior to the new CGI clips going live as a way of introducing the change from video to CGI/3D technology. Crucial to all the clips we developed for the DVSA was that everything in the clips should look as authentic and realistic as possible. In practice, this meant we had to manage everything from the speed of cars relative to stopping distances, when brakes lights come on, movement of the car when suddenly braking or turning, the scenery, to the street signs and road markings as it related specifically to a chosen google map reference. This attention to detail was to ensure that the candidates who took the test would not be distracted from anything in the clips thereby maintaining the integrity of the test and validity of the clips.

And there's also another video there, but I can't embed it.

Funny to talk about video clips with cute animals in them, when I am pretty sure sharing the clips themselves is some kind of crime? Or at least obtaining the clips in a form where they could be shared might be?

So Izzy posted this Bluesky post last night a few days ago

and I know that I need to post my year in review[^1] but I figured I could knock out a quick spec now and get to that kind of self reflection later.

The aim of this spec

To give a way to automate adding a section to a personal website which links to the websites of your friends and allies, and which does so via the medium of 83x11 badges. Ideally you'd have a list of websites in whatever tooling you use to generate your site, and when you push the button it goes off and finds the buttons and downloads them, and then it puts them in a nice little display, each pointing to the canonical url for that site with the proper alt text.

Right now, to do so you'd have visit all your friends sites one-by-one, each time finding the button within each of their idiosyncratic layouts by hand. And while that sounds like a potentially enjoyable task, what's a computer for if not to make things more efficient and less fun?

I'm joking, of course. As we all know, it is possible to have fun on the computer. The way you have fun on the computer is to embark on projects which make things more complicated than necessary, purely for the joy of it. And that's what we're here for today.

Okay, so how does it work?

When a bit of software wants to find the button to use to link for a page, it goes to that page. And it looks in the meta tags for a tag that looks like this:

 <meta property="retro:88x31" content="/button.gif" >

and then to get the alt text, it can look for a tag like this:

<meta property="retro:88x31:alt" content="V's page!" />

(the alt text tag is optional - if you want to render the button and there's no alt text supplied, you should probably put the page title or URL or something in there instead)

A section framed as a Q&A

Are you going to write this up with the proper spec language?
I thought it would be funny to do, but now I come to it I find I can't be bothered.

This looks a lot like the way social preview images work. Like, og:image and all that.
Yes, that's correct.

Is this RFDa? It looks like RDFa. og:image is RDFa.
It does look like that! But no, it's not, there's no retro schema. But you could make one and then I guess it would retroactively be valid RDFa. But also I don't think anyone cares about RDF these day?

Should the responses from this be cached? How often are pages gonna get loaded to find these meta tags?
idk, I guess use the normal HTML caching stuff? Or cache it longer, I guess this stuff doesn't change very often. Maybe you gotta push a button to do a manual fetch? That could be fun!

What URL do the buttons link to?
The one that the software is asked to look up, I guess! I guess ideally you also look at the canonical URL listed in the tags, take note of any redirects, etc. Maybe that gets saved or maybe it's weird to overwrite the one that the user put in. Up to you, implementor of software that reads these tags.

How should these buttons be displayed?
However you like! Design your pages how you like! Be creative! That's the point of this stuff.

I guess actually the basics are: Hyperlinked to the correct site, at native res, and with the right alt text. But beyond that...

Are you concerned about putting the pixel dimensions into the tag name? Doesn't that seem limiting? What happens if they're not actually 83 x 11 pixels in size?
No, no, and idk, show them anyway. Or crop them. Or throw an error. Any of these options seems fine to me?

Should the buttons linked be usable via hotlinking? Or does the software need to download them?
I guess probably best to download them? Otherwise you don't have the nice experience of having a gallery of buttons which go to dead webpages, leaving you to imagine the aesthetic vibes of the sites based purely on 2573[^2] pixels.

Also hotlinks will probably not work half the time. But idk, I don't think this stuff needs to go in the spec.

[^1: no-one is asking for it, but I wanna do it, so. I will. Eventually.]

[^2: more if it's animated]

Update: wait, use this other thing

Evie responds!

Evie On-line

To give a way to automate adding a section to a personal website which links to the websites of your friends and allies, and which does so via the medium of 83x11 badges. Ideally you

ewie

and points me towards the .well-known/button.json spec:

well-known-button

The specification for `/.well-known/button.json`

Codeberg.orgLunarEclipse

which does the same thing – except, in my opinion, with slightly more fuss and less flexibility. But, and this really is the thing which outweighs everything else, it is actually being used by real people already, rather than being an almost completely abstract design exercise.

(wait okay, why do I think it's worse?

• you have one button for a whole site, whereas with the meta tags you can designate different sections to have different buttons
• I find the whole .well-known thing aesthetically unpleasing. A lot of jumbled up files of varying importance and usage. Like meta tags. Hm, trying to think if I can justify the distinction. idk if I can. Okay, ignore this one.
• ok ok the thing about marking whether it's animated or not, and the contrast stuff could actually be useful. and having a variety of buttons which you can pick through on that basis, yes. fine. that's nice.
• and the spec has a lot of references to the JSON schema, which... actually, you know what, I mentioned RDF, I don't have a leg to stand on here. tho they do say you should validate your JSON to make sure it's in conformance, and when I hear that I start to wonder if I can be bothered.
• ok ok, I guess we're getting to the nub of it here: mainly that it's not the design I came up with? yes fine that's probably why.
• wait, also: they say they dealt with the whole thing about not being able to upload arbitrary files on certain web hosts. I don't entirely follow what their solution is, but that part is fine for my spec as long as you can edit the HTML. and normally even if you're on a WYSIWYG editor you can dump some tags into <head>
• anyway, none of this matters, again, people are actually using it, that beats all)

Well, this has been a fun exercise in speculative specification design. I feel like we really captured the whole experience from start to finish.

Hey the Polaris list of influential video games is out!

The Polaris List – Polaris Game Design Retreat

Polaris Game Design Retreat

It's a list of the 100 most influential video games, as voted on by 167 professional game designers (including me!). And if you look carefully, you'll see a comment of mine got used for a pull quote for Deus Ex, one of the top 10 games on the list.

Now that it's out, I figured I should post up my list of games and the notes I submitted for each. So here goes, in no particular order, 10 games that have been influential for me, and a lightly edited version of the notes I sent over at the time:

JS Joust - Standing in a courtyard, seeing the lights glow, seeing people circling, their eyes locking onto each other. It's a videogame but it's also about bodies moving around each other in space.
Soda Constructor - A game can be a toy, a way of exploring something, what if we used sine waves to control springs to make legs. Stylish, undemanding, there for you to investigate as long as you like and then walk away again.
Kentucky Route Zero - Who knew a game could look like this, could be written like this, could be so curious and exploratory and eager to show you new things but also so confident. and also so committed to a particular story and a particular place. Blue collar but also about art galleries. And, too, I can't forget the way my hairs rose when the roof lifted off.
Deus Ex - As a kid, playing through Liberty Island again and again, slowly learning how different actions could provoke different responses. It felt like a world and it also felt like a toybox.
Creatures - The sense that these creatures were made by a bloke in a office somewhere in England, but also the sense that they had some essential mystery to them - how do they behave this way? what is the limits of their behaviour? I think what was also special was the sense that the bloke himself didn't really know the answer to that.
King of Dragon Pass - God I keep waiting for a wave of games to rip it off, and the wave never comes. It's hard to penetrate, committed to rewarding play that fits with a particular fictional culture's mores - but slowly you learn more, and you are constantly surprised by new situations. The way the narrative and the system combine to make something so much larger than the sum of their parts.
Vesper 5 - The idea that a game could be a commitment, a meditation, something that you need to put the effort in to enjoy - that the effort could almost all be found within that commitment, not within the game itself. A game that I played together with others, all understanding the system as it unfolds together.
Digital Bird Playground - A game as well as a playground. Sitting with friends and just... fucking around. You can find your own play within a game, and often it's better that way. And also the sound of the bicycle bell. Just — joy.
Neopets - A game as a social space, a game as a system, a game as something you try to hack and cheat within, a game as something which exists to dangle shiny paintbrushes in front of you. A game which is many games, you can choose, engage the way you want to. A game which is also a web of guilds and forums and shops, half existing within the game but also extending outside of it.
Harmony Summer Hardpack Tape 11-in-1 - Playing this repeatedly and falling in love with the Blondie song Sunday Girl, seeing the scribbles laid out, the hand-drawn marks on the paper on the camera within the texture within the game engine. The collision is wonky and the writing is unmistakeable. That videogame mystery, that essential magic of all of these elements coming togather - but done on the smalles scale.

Out of these, only two featured in the final list - Kentucky Route Zero at #50, and Deus Ex at #7. I am honestly not so very surprised to find my influences out of step with other designers (or am I? I wonder what the average is? Bruno Dias's list definitely has more overlaps)... partly this is that some of my picks are kind of wilfully obscure – but still genuine! – and partly it's that the kind of stuff I usually work on and think about doesn't fit into the mainstream of videogame thinking. I keep talking to people and they ask what I do and I say game design, and then they ask what kinds of games, and then I explain that it's the kind of game where the context they're played within shapes the experience more than most. Where my design thinking is about how the frame of the game shapes it, rather than assuming it will be played with a controller on a TV by 1-4 people. So of course the games I am inspired by will also push those boundaries - games that are durational, games that bleed into the wider web, games that are about creating things or games that are about interacting with a software object or objects more than they're about exploring particular goals.

Anyway, all that said, I'm still surprised that Neopets didn't place. Definitely influential!

It is approximately half ten on a Sunday evening and I am feeling pleasantly tired and a little drunk. I am drinking tea from an extravagant mug* I purchased only hours ago. I purchased the mug in the final hours of the studio sale that the pottery studio I am a member of runs twice a year. I also had work for sale! I sold approximately £220 worth of it! More than I ever have before!

I was mostly selling "bud vases", a selection of vases I made while practicing collaring in to make bottle shaped forms. They are pretty cute, I think! I was also selling some new stuff I've made trying out more exciting clays than the standard studio stoneware. Some decent sized bowls in lavafleck, and some delicate cups in porcelain, both glazed (with pretty different effects) with turquoise. I also had some older stuff on the seconds table – a load of cups glazed in a pinkish glaze called "rice husk chun", and a vase which I personally hate, but think is a decent prototype for something that could go somewhere good in the future.

You might be reading this post and thinking... why are there not more pictures? I want to see the nice pottery! Show it off! And the answer is that in my pottery journey I got to the point I was making good stuff, and to the point where I had to think about whether I wanted to take this seriously and sell my work and generally build myself up as a potter. And the first step of that was getting kinda okay as a product photographer, so I could represent my work online rather than purely when you hold it in your hand. And then I decided... I couldn't really be bothered? I wanted to get better at pottery, not photography. Not that I hate photography, it's just a different skill, and I only have so much effort to put into this stuff, and apparently I want all of that effort to go into making and not into ~~content~~.

I guess what you could say is that for the first time in my life I faced down the barrier separating a hobby from becoming a different type of work, and I said... nah. Let it be.

But actually I should say I think I have gotten decent at pottery? Like, I find myself offering up advice to other people in the studio and realising it is based on some experience. I think the stuff I am making is good? I should say that I seem to be allergic to having a consistent style or a consistent type of thing I make, and instead find myself constantly shifting from project to project. Stuff that looks very different from each other, new techniques, etc etc. It's fun! I like to figure things out! I've never been one to focus on steady improvement if there's novelty I can explore instead. And it turns out that in exploring new things, you find some steady improvement - some things repeat, and some things you can take from one place and apply to others.

Anyway - with life and fatigue and everything I sometimes don't get to the studio much. And I think about how much I'm paying for my membership (about two hundred pounds a month) and I wonder if it's really worth it. And then I think about how if I left, I wouldn't be able to just pop in and do something creative of an evening. And when I do pop in, there's almost always someone I'm friends with (or at least friendly with) in as well. And then we have a chat about each others work, or just a chat in general. And often enough someone's brought some snacks in, or asks if I'm up for a beer. I am a little drunk because I was there after we closed having drinks and chatting. It's a community! It's an important community in my life! I enjoy being a part of it. And I enjoy making pottery. Long may this all continue.

* by Esme!

Two contrary things to note about this webpage:

First, as the domain name suggests, the guy runs a business selling antique buildings? Like, he'll sell you all the parts for a barn built in the 1500s, plans and all that, and then you can build it yourself on a spare bit of land. genuine antique buildings, as a service. Don't these sentences soothe you to read:

Our yard at Dunsfold holds our stock of complete frames of ancient barns, cartsheds, granaries and huses.

The frames have all been measured, drawn, numbered and photographed before being carefully dismantled, ready for re-erection.

And as part of that, he has a old-school website, with a textured background and slightly mismatched text and some baked-into-images menus and generally it's very delightful in a nostalgic way.

But weirdly enough, he's also in the business of managing information. As important as the parts of the buildings themselves are the details of how to construct them - the photographs, plans, reference for part numbers, embodied expertise and experience in mortar types and foundations and the appropriate way to roof them. I can only imagine a good amount of this information would be provided to you in a folder or a ring binder. It's an information business, but it's one which could have existed in a similar form... let's say since the invention of the photograph.

The other thing to note about this webpage is that replica watches uk it contains spam links inserted into the text every so often, styled like regular text. These links are not intended to be swiss replica watches clicked on, but are instead there purely for search engine crawlers to notice and thereby boost searches for those terms.

Which also now maybe feels a little nostalgic? Nowadays if you were gonna hijack insecure webhosting to insert commercial messages, you might insert a phrase you hope an LLM might internalise. And not just a little innocuous link, styled unobtrusively but that you need to ensure is visible (Google has defences against invisible links, they've been fighting these battles for a long time). More likely a big long spew of verbiage, the kind written by an AI itself, linked somewhere and with the hope that an LLM would greedily slurp it up, so desperate are they for more text to learn from.

Ooops, I set out to write about a good handwritten webpage and I ended up talking about AI. Okay, let's try to redeem myself with a tiny bit of archaeology. The source code says that it was created with "Microsoft FrontPage 12.0". When I try to search for that, to see when that software was released, the AI overview (oops! again!) tells me it doesn't exist. The last version was v10. How weird! But then, I find this forum thread, and the answer clears up: it was originally authored in Microsoft FrontPage, and then later edited by Microsoft Expression Web. And there's a bug which sets the meta name="GENERATOR" tag that way. Expression Web was discontinued in 2012. I wonder when he last updated this page.

(thanks to Russ Garrett for linking this site)

I've followed Alice Ruppert on social media for a while now. She runs a good website focused on horse games. I'm not a horse girl! I mean horses are fine, but they're not something I'm mega into. But what I am interested in is the culture of games, and I am interested in ways to expand that culture. Anyway, she's recently posted a breakdown of the marketing strategy for a game she's been helping on, and it gave me some thoughts. Here it is:

And let me quote a nice big chunk of it:

Key Learnings and General Takeaways

• The people yearn for good horse games
• You can do what I do for horses with whatever interests you and whatever might be useful for your future games. Cats? Dogs? Trains? Fashion? Archery? Cooking? Whatever hobby and interest you have outside of games, community and expertise can be built around it and its overlap with games, and you can then use that community to give them what they want, i.e. thematically fitting games. If you WANT to do this and aren’t sure how to get started, please reach out, I’m happy to share my learnings and strategies, but don’t want to further inflate this post.
• Building thematically focused communities is providing a genuine service for players who want that type of content (and it’s a bit of a moderation effort of course), but it’s also an incredible tool for targeting your exact audience. And if you run those communities, you can run them in a way that is relatively developer-friendly rather than allergic to “self promotion” as some player-run communities are. (just don’t let people spam, and lead by example of posting content that adds actual value to players, not only your own self promo)
• See all you have to do is invest your free time for seven years to become known for the one thing that you care a lot about in games and then maybe you can make that profitable and you know what they say about dream jobs the only risk is completely mixing up your hobby and job and never having actual free time again surely that can absolutely not go wrong, it’s easy!
• Nostalgia and childhood memories can be an excellent driver of reach and interest, even without any official IP or existing brand following

And all this is pretty inspiring, right?

Because the story of indie games is that it started as an identity. You were an "indie game dev", you were the kind of person who "played indie games". There was lots of range within this, but there were core games and events that you would know about if you were in this world. You would have opinions about Indie Game The Movie. There was a community - it was large and amorphously defined, but it was a real community.

And that time has long since passed. What counts as an indie game? It's too broad, too diffuse. The competition to just be a game in that space is too much, the only people can cut through are the lucky and those with deep pockets. "Indiepocalype" and those graphs of more and more games getting released on Steam each year.

So, what can you do as a creator? You find a smaller space to exist within. You find a smaller community where you can know a bunch of the people within it. And to do this, you need people who can create those spaces, who can label those games as something. People who bring a community together. Now you're not competing with "indie games", you're competing with "horse games". It's a more interesting space to be in - you can talk about horse animation, you can talk about how horses will rest with a back leg locked but not a front one, you can reference very specific games you wish people would remake.

And there's a few of these communities I can think of. They operate differently, but they're all places where interesting work is happening & where people are pushing each other to explore new spaces. Here's a off-the-top-of-my-head list:

• Alice's horse game stuff
• Thinky Games, a big umbrella term for puzzle games etc. A website & community & convention & ...
• Domino Club - a gang of folk making games largely for each other and slowly getting more and more into fucked up sex stuff as they realise there's no reason not to. That's my understanding anyway, and I am going to assume it's true from the way the link at the start of this paragraph is blocked in the UK.
• I assume all this low-fi PS1 horror stuff is coming out of a community, although I don't know the details.
• I think Laura Michet mentioned discussion of tropes in the incremental game community? Again, I don't know the details
• Oh yeah, not videogames but this is probably a good place to link to Adrian Hon's upcoming Jubensha convention
• I'm sure I could come up with like 10 more if I sat and thought, but I want to spend less time writing each of these posts and this is a dangerously big topic to start to get into, so I won't.

To conclude: I hate people saying that anything is the future of indie games. Because there is no "the" about it. There's loads of futures, and they'll all exist side by side with each other, influencing each other and diverging and going in weird new directions. Indie games are dead! Long live indie games!

this evening I saw the show You Look Okay To Me, which is on at Theatre Deli as part of the Voila! theatre festival. I don't generally seek out shows about chronic illness - I feel like I already understand the subject more intimately than I would like... but I was there for complicated work reasons that I won't go into here. and, well, this post is written to say how good I found it, and to encourage you to see it. it is on tomorrow!

why was it so good? well, to get the table stakes out of the way - it was a show written about chronic illness, by someone with chronic illness, and it got to the complicated places that are familiar to me and it did not spend its time trying to do basic 101-level intros for people who don't know how that works. or, I mean, I'm not saying it isn't accessible, but it trusts you to come with it as it goes deep.

and it's surprising and funny - it makes choices you weren't expecting. you can have the scene where the doctor shrugs off concerns, talks about how it must be all in your head. yes, a good thing to show. but the choice that really lifts it is to play out that interaction as high camp, talk dirty to me, the doctor unrobing his white coat as he tells her her blood results look perfectly healthy.

or, parts of the writing - just deft stuff, the way that the boyfriend is characterised, is a specific person in specific ways. his knowledge of animal facts, his distrust of metaphor.

and the acting! good acting! acting that, even when the artifice of the show is foregrounded, still makes you believe in the characters and their relationships. shifting from easy intimacy to I-own-this-shit writhing without apparent effort.

and, like, speaking of effort - what has to be remarked on is the way that the ethos of the show extends beyond the world of the show and into how it's put on. the script has multiple breaks for rest, something signalled up front and then marked throughout the performance. and when I say breaks for rest - the lights stay low, the actress lies still on the bed which is most of the stage, and we wait while she rests to carry on. and it's easy to talk about this being a gimmick... but I've been this person, I've thought about - can I do this specific thing, where will I have a chance to rest, if I don't do this then maybe I will be able to do that, but I still need to plan for whether I can't, after all... and, like the main character says, "I hate how good I am at pretending I'm well". it's easiest to sweep that behind the curtain, to do the labour and not show it. it's messy and complicated and difficult to expose that, it's additional labour to convey the labour you are already doing. it's tiring to tell people you are tired! but this is a show which does in fact do that. it talks about it on the stage but it also enacts it in the way that it is performed. which is a deft fucking thing to do - but hopefully it also makes it more possible to perform. I mean also, I very much notice that the show is set up so that Anna can perform lying down or sitting up and only very occasionally standing. that's baked into the show. and that doesn't lessen the show, it strengthens it. the message is within the frame of the show, and the message is also part of how it is framed.

one thing I felt lucky about when I got ill was that I knew people who had been chronically ill for a long time. and that I could both learn from them, but also that I knew about their work, and I knew that they had made interesting, complicated work from within their illness. I am someone, for my sins, who does find a lot of meaning from my creative work. and to know that there was the potential to still do that work, even from my sickbed - if I had to give up a lot of other things, then I could make it through, if I could keep that.

and watching this show, it reminded me of those feelings and times. it wasn't just good at representing chronic illness. it was good, full stop - it made smart choices and did things I admired. it was made by people with chronic illness, it could only have been made by people with chronic illness - and it was good, it was doing things I had not seen elsewhere before. I have spent too long in my bed, watching the world pass me by, wanting to be part of it, wanting to make a mark. and this show was made by someone who has had that same experience, it depicts that same experience of life passing by and becoming a ghost unable to touch it. and yet - here we are! at Theatre Deli! telling that to be a lie! it is not inevitable, it is difficult, but it is possible for new and exciting things to enter that larger world via your narrow bed.

anyway, apparently they want to bring it to Edinburgh. I hope they manage to do that. and it's on tomorrow (which is the 8th November), if you're in London & free!

There's a bit in the White Pube interview with Flo Dill[1], where Flo talks about how she feels like artists have this compulsion, this absolute need to make art, and how she doesn't have that, and feels a little wistful over that lack.

And Zarina does ask her - so if you could choose to have that, would you? And she says no, I'm happier without.

And, like, she's on radio, and she's conducting an interview as she says this, so she's very clearly a creative person all the same.

And this mindset has previously made me question whether I am an artist - I don't know that I feel driven to make art, I feel like I could just not make it.

And I mean, I do call myself an artist, often enough. But also I don't feel like I need to? I was doing the same kinds of stuff before I felt like I should use that term, it was just games and other projects. And then I hung out with artists some, and felt like I should also call myself one. They said "you're an artist! you should call yourself that!". But at the same time, I don't feel like the communities of artists I hang out with are more core to my conception of myself than the communities of gamedevs I hang out with. I don't feel the drive - feel a strong enough drive, anyway - to get exhibited in arts spaces, to have a career in that world. I mean, it'd be nice, I like to go to weird places, I like to see people see my work, I like to feel important. But I don't feel like I need it to feel like I've made it. To make the making worthwhile. [2]

And I mean, that's the thing. When I look back, I can see a revealed preference - given a choice between more money or working on something interesting, I choose the something interesting. And interesting means a new project, means more creative control over it, means trying something I don't know will work. Following my nose, I guess.

But, I mean. I don't feel it like a drive or an itch. Not really a compulsion. And when I'm making things, I don't often feel transported in creative visions. I mean, sometimes, very rarely, I do. But most of the time it's just... work. Often irritating work -- I tend to have the habit of making the kind of things where I have to do a lot of tedious stuff in order that the people who will interact with it later can get to do the fun creative state-space-exploration themselves. Instead, it's just a thought of "oh, it would be cool if...". Or "someone really should make...". I'll even admit it's sometimes "wait, [person]'s thing is getting some attention and I reckon I could do better". Or even "they're wrong, but to demonstrate the counterexample I will need to...". Or, with pottery, often it's a "oh, I should learn to make X" - but I have a bit of a different relationship to pottery than to my other work, there's something about the fact that I'm making single artefacts, useful things that can be appreciated even if they're worse in every aspect than some other bowl or mug or plate or vase existent in the world. I've spoken about this before.

Anyway. My point is, I don't feel like my self identity is bound up in calling myself an artist. I don't feel like I'm compelled to make art. I could not! But, and I guess this is the important bit, I don't feel like I have to be compelled to do it in order to choose to do it. I could live a different life, but I think it would not be as rich. So I choose this one.

And, funnily enough, that last paragraph also describes how I feel about being trans.

[1] A transcript of the relevant section:

Zarina: But um yeah, we thought we'd speak to artists about maybe like a more general sense of like how they go about things. And every single person we spoke to said in some way, in some form, I have no idea why I do this. This is not materially or financially beneficial to me. I'm like, I'm not I'm not paying my rent with this. Like, it's not like--this isn't a living, but I don't know how to not make art.
Gab: You have to.
Zarina: Yeah, it actually comes out of me. Yeah, it's like a compulsion.
Flo: I wish I knew what that felt like.
Gab: But but I mean you've got like a different relationship with like a different thing. Like do you feel like you have to do this? [gesturing at the soil in which they are digging]
Flo: No.
[all laughing]
Zarina: Do you want to do this though?
Flo: Yes, very much. I find it really enjoyable. I find it really satisfying and I find it kind of therapeutic which I'm sure that artists feel in some way about the stuff that they do too. Maybe to greater or lesser degrees with all of the different things. I don't have that like – it's not my self-expression. It's not my – if I don't do this I'm going to die.
Gab: Okay, yeah, yeah.
Flo: You know, I don't know what that feels like. And I I really think only artists feel like that.
Zarina: Do you want it though?
Flo: Maybe not.
Gab: It's so intense
Flo: Honestly, after I read your book, I was like, "Oh, I'm good. I'm good. I'm good."

[^2] a sidebar here for how maybe this is because I started by making Things For Online, and, like net artists, therefore have a weird relationship to the gallery. If I make a webpage which is itself a work of art, you can put it in a gallery - but it's a weird fit compared to looking at it from your computer, it's a translation of the piece which has lost something, the same way that a high resolution scan of a painting you can look at on your computer has lost something compared to looking at it in the flesh.

I was just watching Ada Null's 2025 Roguelike Celebration talk, and there's a bit where she's riffing off Kate Compton:

Picture a garden full of wild trees of the same species. If you compare any two trees, you can clearly tell they're different trees that have grown in their own way. But you'd be hard-pressed if the next day I asked you to describe exactly how they were different. They're just, you know, they're different trees. They they branch differently, they're slightly different heights. These trees aren't characterful, at least not relative to each other. So, they aren't perceptually unique, but they are perceptually differentiated. Once more, this garden's kind of boring, but it's a different kind of boring from our topiary garden. I feel like we could walk through this garden forever and ever, and we'd know we're making progress through it and not just walking in circles, cuz these trees are actually different, but it's all just blah. It's not really a garden anymore, more an endless forest.

[timestamp, 44:50]

And that made me think about George Outhwaite, a painter who paints the same trees repeatedly, finding new things each time:

a few years ago i had an opportunity to pitch a book to a proper nature publisher, so i pitched a field guide to a single butterfly species, with 100s of illustrations covering every slight visual variation, it wasn't picked up

it was based on the time my mum saw a late season ringlet in the garden and after looking at a field guide decided it was a mazarine blue, which is extinct in the uk, the only way i could convince her it wasn't was to show her the natural history museum's digital collection of ringlets

I love scientific illustration but not it's tendency towards generalisation, i'm a portrait painter I can't paint the average

[Bluesky]

I guess the point of this post is just to make the kind of shallow point that the property of whether something is interesting depends as much on the attitude of the viewer as it does on the thing itself. This is one reason I enjoyed doing my podcast the machine gently stutters ❏❐❑❒ - every episode, I was reading out an instance of procedurally generated text. And, often this text is kind of bad, or is there to make a point by its volume, it's presence, it's overall structure, and is not really designed to stand up to the serious scrutiny of a line by line reading. And yet I found that when I did subject it to the serious kind of attention necessary to perform it, when I did try to infuse it's (often) lack of meaning with as much meaning as I could, that I could find something there.

I collect sentences I find striking on the internet, and often the sentences I am collecting are put out to fill space, because it's expected that there will be some text in a place and so some text has to be created to fill it. Text that's designed for machines (SEO), or text that's written carelessly. And yet the more you look at it the more remarkable it is. I can find as much to wonder about in this byproduct-text as I can in a seriously considered work of literature. Often this meaning is unselfconscious, or the observations are as much about the environment that selected for this text, but it comes through just the same.

In Zen they say: If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting.

At the New School once I was substituting for Henry Cowell, teaching a class in Oriental music. I had told him I didn't know anything about the subject. He said, "That's all right. Just go where the records are. Take one out. Play it and then discuss it with the class," Well, I took, out the first record. It was an LP of a Buddhist service. It began with a short microtonal chant with sliding tones, then soon settled into a single loud reiterated percussive beat. This noise continued relentlessly for about fifteen minutes with no perceptible variation. A lady got up and screamed, and then yelled, "Take it off. I can't bear it any longer:' I took it off. A man in the class then said angrily, "Why'd you take it off? I was just getting interested:'

John Cage, Silence, Lectures and Writings

Okay, that's all well and good, V, but it's more complicated than that because the trees that Ada is talking about aren't real trees. In the real world, the trees have infinite detail to them. The more you look, the more there is to find. But in the digital world, even the most intricately simulated bowl of oatmeal is going to bottom out at a certain point. The oats won't bear the marks of the particular processes that were applied to them since harvesting. The milk won't come from a particular herd of cows. The bowl won't have been made in a particular factory, out of clay sourced from particular clay pits, bearing the unique mineral composition that that signifies. The glaze - do you think this digital version will consider the glaze separately from the ceramic? Do you think that the choice of digital glaze will be decided based on having similar shrinkage factors to the digital clay, such that it isn't prone to crazing when run through a simulated firing schedule?

That's the thing about going outside. It's so much... so much everything more than the computer. And the computer can do some pretty amazing things, but the thing about a simulation is that it is not not the real thing. The thing about a map is that it is not the territory. The model is useful because it has made a choice for what to model. And that is where the art comes in.

There's also something here about the trees being within a garden. But I just got a book about gardens, so I will wait until I am deeper within that to have those thoughts.

So, I think the first time it was Tom Walker. He's an Australian comedian who does a bunch of Twitch streams, and he decided to do a stream where he would flip a coin and get ten heads in a row.

EXCEPT, he made it awful by adding the extra condition that if he flipped 10 tails in a row, he would change the target to 11. And so on.

It took him 8 hours and a bit to accomplish. He used the words "coin madness" repeatedly. He talked a lot about the way he was flipping. Felt uncomfortable when friends came over and flipped for him. A lot of fetishising the specific coin he was flipping with. It's inevitable, I think, when faced with random chance, to start trying to find patterns. A desire for consequence for your choices. Ways to bend fate to your will.

I was entertained and inspired by seeing that stream (after the fact). Now, I run an app which allows people to very quickly make games, including making choices with some simple random outcomes. And I always feel like I should be using it more, you know, setting a good example. So, I made my own version. But I did not add the 10 tails bit, because it is a bad idea and also it would have made the logic much more annoying to make.

You can play it here:

(ah, I love how the inline embed works...)

It was interesting making it - not least the desire to add some kind of gameplay excitement for getting multiple coins flipped consecutively. I added this by using a selection of coins, one for each flip. This starts off kind of humdrum, but when you see the 7th coin for the first time, after tens of minutes of flipping... I think it works.

The other part of it was adding to the physical labour of flipping. Each flip, for my game, takes at least two clicks. And restarting requires clicking in a new location. There's a bit of rhythm. Something you can tune into over time. I think Tom Walker got better at flipping a coin after 8 hours of doing it. If you play this, you will get better at flipping these virtual coins.

And then, about a week ago, the videogame "Unfair Flips" came out.

Unfair Flips on Steam

A non-idle clicker game about flipping a coin that hates you. Starting with just a 20% chance of getting heads, can you get ten heads in a row?

STEAM

I mentioned that I had made a game with a similar concept to Heather Flowers, the developer. She said:

which means I think the chain of inspiration I am portraying has some validity. Enough for a blog post, anyway.

Anyway, earlier today, my new Steam Deck arrived in the post. And about an hour ago, I started using that Steam Deck to play Unfair Flips.

Now I should note that, across all of these experiences, I have never flipped ten heads in a row[^1]. I believe I will soon achieve this in Unfair Flips. I mean, eventually. I'm gonna get there[^2]

(warning for spoilers, such as they are, for Unfair Flips in the rest of this post. These are mechanical spoilers, rather than about narrative twists but... it's a game of mechanics)

The structure of Unfair Flips is that you start at 20% odds of flipping a head. And you get a little money for every head you flip. And you get power-ups. If you've played a videogame with this kind of economic engine - maybe an idle game or something with a similar kind of structure - you might be familiar with the power curve. You start by grinding out individual things. And then over time you have the money to buy upgrades, and the upgrades mean you get resources faster, and the resources mean you can buy yet more upgrades. The costs go up on a power curve, and the rewards go up on a power curve that is just a little bit steeper. The game I was playing before this, Strange Jigsaws, about jigsaws that are strange, even had a bit where it did one of these [^3]. That's how common this particular setup is.

And... Unfair Flips doesn't work that way. I mean, it starts like that. The coin gets more valuable. You can get bonus multipliers. You can reduce the flip times, you can adjust the probability. But as you get to around a 50% probability of getting heads... everything is maxed out. Well, except the one which bumps up the probability, and the price of the new upgrades is pretty steep. And the power curve that usually follows the price curve, which makes those upgrades more affordable... well, that stopped a while back. If you want to climb the big numbers, you have to do it the hard way.

So: you start with an unfair coin. You do some idle game power curve upgrade stuff. And now... you have a coin that approximates the one in your pocket. And you still have to flip it.

One other effect of the upgrades is to imbue getting a streak with even more excitement. It's not just about the possibility of succeeding getting raised... it's also that this is where the money comes from. Getting a combo. More reasons to hope, more reasons to get anxious after 6 in a row. Maybe those big prices for reducing the probability are sensible? If you get a good enough streak, I mean.

And that streak excitement is amplified by the sound design. It's got a good coin flip sound, of course. Little metallic ting wobbling away. But also there's this little guitar strum when you get a head. And a second, with the pitch just adjusted when you get a second. And a third... a chord is being built, and you want to feel it completed. And you feel the dissatisfaction when it doesn't.

Let's talk about one of the updates - the time it takes to flip. You can reduce it! Now, the particular superstition I find myself indulging... is that it is best to flip immediately as the coin lands. I mean, it is clearly better - it means you flip fractionally faster. But not such that it is actually beneficial, outside of a speedrunning scenario [^4]. Instead, mainly... I like the rhythm. I like getting better at the rhythm. It upsets me a little when I get a run of heads when I am not tapping on the rhythm - seems unfair, I'm playing badly and I still get the reward?

(It's also enjoyable how, when you are in the upgrades bit of the curve, the flip time changes and so you have to adjust your rhythm. A nice bit of actual gameplay, there.)

One feature I found myself wishing for, and I am totally not arguing for it, but instead just kind of noting that it's interesting I was wishing for it... was something that showed the distribution of outcomes that I had actually seen. A long run where my probability was around 30% where I was like... is this busted? Seems like fewer than usual. I want stats so I can be sure (if I can't trust the 30% I have been given, why would I trust the other one?)

This kind of dissatisfaction is of course why games usually don't rawdog probability. It feels unfair. Randomness is clumpy, what we expect is something with a bit of scale invariance. Poisson disc distribution seems fairer than a true random distribution. There's a reason we use other colours than white for our noises. But... it's good to be reminded what a run of independent events feels like. A good lesson.

Oh, I went back to it after writing all of that... and I ended up flipping with my eyes closed, just vibing with the rhythm and appreciating how I could track the game state with with sounds... and I won??? On 55% odds of a head each time. I opened my eyes to see a final flip ready to trigger. I flipped... and the coin never landed. End of the game, that's what victory looks like [^5]. 90 minutes of play time, apparently.

Wow, what a game.

Aaaaand... I should also mention the other coin flipping game that is set to imminently release! It's called "Q-Up", it's a satire of online multiplayer games, all big brash esports arena with a fridge of the sponsor drink in the corner. Except now you can't complain that it's unfair or whatever, the outcome is literally just a coin flip. It's led by the guy that did Universal Paperclips, and also working on it is my pal Joon. Hi Joon! Anyway, I haven't played it but there's a demo!

Q-UP on Steam

Sick of long queues, unfair matchups, and arbitrary reflex tests? Try Q-UP, the coin flipping eSport. It’s one part clicker, one part multiplayer strategy game, one part demented capitalism simulator, and 100% completely random.

STEAM

Oh, I came back to finish this post and actually put it up... And as I write this, Jerma is playing Unfair Flips. And Northern Lion was earlier, as well. From the stream it came, and to the stream it returns.

[1: how did i test mine? i cheated. you can cheat too! use the back button and you can redo a flip. sorry if knowing this ruins the game for you.]

[2: ok ok I don't know if I'll actually get the 10% chance of getting a real 10 heads ending. But, y'know. I will get to 9 heads and one not-tails. That's good enough for me.]

[3: I recommend the game. It's a mark of how strange the jigsaws are that this small parody idle game counts as a jigsaw]

[4: horrifyingly, it seems like there is one]

[5: again, fuck trying again for the 10% chance. I mean I appreciate the taunt, it's a good commentary on videogames, and a good joke. But also not one I feel I have to personally put myself through to appreciate it]

As I am writing this[1], I just got done doing my first big larp. By which I mean the first that lasted longer than a few hours, the first one I've travelled for, the first that I have slept during. As I understand is normal after this, I am buzzing with it, absolutely at risk of boring the hell out of people about it. So let's talk a little about it.

First up, the details. The larp was called Children of the House, it was made by Poltergeist Larp - the larp runners were Lotta, Sandy & Lucky, and it was hosted in Pałac Lubinicko in Poland, which is a few hours from Berlin. Tickets were €350, which covered their costs but not their labour - this covered the larp, accommodation and food, but not travel. It was a larp in "the Nordic style" - which means it's more on the artsy experimental side.

The larp was an adaptation of the book Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. It's a beautiful book about a man who lives within an endless house – giant halls filled with statues. There are clouds on the upper floors, and oceans in the drowned halls below. The man is filled with a great sense of peace and benevolence, and he has lost all memory of a life outside of it.

This being a larp, the primary change is that it is not a story of a single man, but instead the story of a community. We live together within the Embrace, which name refers both to our community and to the room in which we live. We each have names that denote our function within the community - I was Mender, who attempts to prevent imbalance within the Children. I related these imbalances to the operation of the House - defects of the body related to the oceans, defects of the mind related to the statues, and defects of the spirit related to the clouds. There were also Children who fetched things, who led our rituals, who made decisions, who explored farther halls, who interpreted signs in the clouds or listened to the statues, who recorded our histories, who predicted the tides. And Children newly arrived in our community, who we were in the process of finding roles for.

The larp had a three act structure – wait, before I go into that I should sketch out the experience as a whole. Ahead of the larp there was homework - a costume to prep, a player guide to read, and a character sheet to internalise. On Thursday I woke up in Berlin, got breakfast at the hostel, and got a train to the airport (it ran late). I there met with fellow players who were giving me a lift to the venue, a mansion in Poland a few hours drive away. We arrived and unloaded, and I sat a little awkwardly waiting for the larp to start. I didn't know any of the other players, or the organisers (except one player who I had talked to a little at AMAZE earlier in the year). The afternoon was then taken up by workshops - structured exercises to prepare us to play - and then we entered into the House that evening. This was the start of Act 1, which was meant to be low conflict - setting a baseline of harmony among the Children, and letting us settle into our characters. We slept within the game, had breakfast within the game, and then had our first break - an hour to reset and do calibration (jargon for discussing how our characters will relate to each other, and what kinds of play we might give each other). Then back into the game for Act 2 - for this, the larp runners told us we were aiming to add a little more tension, but not to get as far as open conflict. We played within Act 2 for most of the day, and then there was a final calibration break - a longer one this time - in the evening, and then we were in Act 3, where we were told the intensity could reach new heights ("but you should still stay together as a community, and don't die"). We played through the evening, slept, and then played through to the climax of the larp the next evening. There was a couple of hours of practical info and workshops to decompress, and then there was a party - alcohol, a disco, lots of very hyper chatting, some people hooked up. And then we woke early in the morning, helped the organisers pack up and reset the venue, and then I got a lift back to Berlin and arrived exhausted at my friend's apartment, where I am writing this (the next day). That's four days in total, with a solid 48 hours within the fiction of the House itself.

I struggled with my fatigue a fair amount during the larp - especially during Act 2, I could feel the brainfog and my instinctive reaction was to go entirely into rest mode. But I also knew that I needed to keep making connections to other characters to have some setup to play off later.

My character, Mender, was focused on the other Children rather than the House itself - which meant I didn't have particularly organic reasons to explore, do blackbox scenes, etc. (Blackbox scenes are where you go into a separate space to play out a pre-prepared scenario - something where the organisers help you set up something more intense, rather than something that has come up naturally). Instead a lot of my play ended up being what I referred to as "toxic therapy" - coming to a character, asking how they were, and attempting to sooth their worries and doubts about the House. My line was: the House protects us, the House will provide, the important thing is the warmth of the Embrace. I felt like a theologian - studiously collecting evidence and then finding a way to turn all of it towards the conclusion that everything is as it should be. It was nice to have a reason to always pay attention to new discoveries, to be open to them - but always to push back against doubts and worries (which was the natural arc of the game, I think - to start from acceptance and rebel against that). In the calibration break before Act 3, I went for a little walk by myself and gave myself the goal to keep arguing for the House, and eventually lose that argument honestly - but I failed in that quest, and instead found that I kept the faith, even to the end. The House is good, it is good for us to lose our memories, the warmth of the Embrace and the sublime peace of the House are what matters above all other things. I think I even went far enough with this that I convinced my off-game self of the rightness of my position [2].

Let me give you a peak moment for me, along with the context needed to understand it.

Meals were provided to us "by the House" - we would find them by a statue in the main halls. We would assemble and gather them, slowly walking down in a procession. There would be much singing - "it fills us, it feeds us, the House does provide". Beautiful improvised singing, some humming and some harmonies layered under and over. The food would be carried to the table within the Embrace, we would line up with plates and serve ourselves. The food for all the meals was tortillas with olives, dates, hummus, seeds, often other bits alongside. I was warned that it might not seem like enough - but I found it was plenty, after a meal or two I adapted fine. We would sit down to eat in silence - most of this ritual I've described was created by the players together, but the idea of silence during eating was the one bit that the designers asked us to abide by specifically. That was such a delicate bit of design. Voice, who was played by a player with a lovely Scottish accent, would lead us in these rituals - collecting the food, handing out plates and flatbread and collecting many of the plates, and then at the end offering thanks for the food that we had received. I grew to love these meals - the silence made the space feel reverential, the arguing (of course, it's a larp) ceased and we could feel togetherness. The repetition of the ritual, but obviously with variations, singing together... and of course, it helped that my character was a true believer in the togetherness of our community.

So that's the context. By the third act, players were rebelling in whatever direction they could - they wondered if the food was making them forget, they wondered if breaking the rituals could effect change in the community, they distrusted the Ancestors (NPCs who visited us, who we initially held in high regard). So, in that final lunchtime meal, several of them chose to break the silence. I gathered my food from the high table and I came back - I was going to sit by Voice, and then she asked me "would you like to sit with us?" in a mild and welcoming voice. %%%not clear speaking is the problem%% The sacrilege! And from the person who led us through these rituals, whose very purpose was to do so! I said (said!) "no, I would not" and walked away to sit elsewhere. I ate my food with alarm as other Children within the room talked. They did not do so loudly - they quietly talked about the savour of the food, they offered bits of flatbread to each other. They transgressed in the mildest possible way. After I had eaten, I saw that Voice had left the room - she was eating in the vestibule just outside the Embrace, by the statue of the Satyr. And then I thought about how she would not say those closing words, ending the meal - and I broke down sobbing.

What glorious play! Real tears, a real sense of loss - the community I loved so much had turned against each other, the things I treasured most were discarded. And it was only getting worse.

I put my plate away in an upset, stormed out, confronted Voice (a quiet and bitter "has this helped?"), and in this was caused an argument to start which broke the silence even more comprehensively. I had no heart for arguing, I was only for grief. I took myself to the upper floor to sit by the statue of Beekeeper and admire her silence and grace until I was filled again by the tranquillity of the House.

I'm not sure I have more organised things to say about the larp. The rest of this post will be scattered thoughts:

It was strange waking up in character. I was quiet, and my dreams were those of myself, not my character. It took me a few minutes to start interacting as Mender, often after going off-game to brush teeth etc first. In the car on the way back, a fellow player said they had a dream in character, and I was jealous of that.

But on the other hand, it has been 4 or 5 days since I left, and I still sometimes think of the voice or faces of my fellow players.

During the afterparty, someone came up to the off-game lounge where I was sitting. Come down! The song after next is going to be the pornipolka! Come dance it! It's a big tradition!

So I did, and found to my surprise that this larp tradition stretching back to the 90s is in fact a tradition that I was already familiar with. I knew it as Orcadian Strip The Willow, a ceilidh dance that was always the second last song at ceilidhs when I was at university in Edinburgh. You spin your partner with one arm, and then spin all the people on one side of the room with the other, moving down the room as you go. Unfortunately they skipped the bit where you spin real fast with your partner at the start – booo!

The night before joining the larp I slept in a hostel with 3 other people. During the larp, I slept on a mattress on the floor with 20 others. I slept much better during the larp.

I was warned to expect physical discomfort, but I didn't experience this (except for stupidly not getting into my sleeping bag the first night and waking up a little cold -- but that's my own fault).

The food, too, I was warned about. But actually I found I adapted just fine to it. Some figs and a handful of raisins for an energy boost at the end, a little bit of calibration for what was enough to be full, and how much I could take without causing anyone else to miss out of something.

I miss being in a community in this way - I have been talking about it with friends as being like in a cult. That sense of togetherness, singing together, eating together, knowing that there is usually someone in the room you can go sit with and have a quiet talk with. I don't have this level of physical touch within my life out of game. I do have friends, an active life filled with people. And I find I am even hungrier for it now.

I guess one reason that I feel this especially is because my character always believed in the benevolence of the House. I didn't have any fear or doubt about whether it was right to be in the House or not, whether losing our memories was something to fear or not.

In the briefing after the larp had ended, one of the few questions that were asked was "where can we go if we want to have sex during the afterparty?". The answer was: this isn't a larp with a sex room, and we don't want to create one now, but please find somewhere quiet and where you're not going to be exposing yourself to other people, you're creative. Also we have condoms and the morning after pill in the player supplies[4], help yourself.

And indeed multiple people did hook up at the party (though, just for clarity, I didn't). I have a bunch of thoughts about the relationship between in-character and off-game attraction and relationships, and indeed about neurodivergent styles of hitting on people and how they relate to larp. But I am not going to write them here.

I should also say that apparently the run before us was much more inclined to in-game cuddle puddles, and in character romance & poly groupings. I wasn't aware of many (if any) in-game relationships in our run[3]. Me and two others calibrated for a polycule in game but it never properly came into being - it was defined around our shared opposition to the forces of change, but it turned out we had enough internal disagreements that that dynamic was never quite realised. Or maybe we were too hesitant about initiating that kind of scene. Or the story just moved on...

Sometimes when I was tired I would slip out of character and I would make somewhat sarky jokes. I kind of missed being cheeky, it wasn't really within my character, but the characters who did seemed to have a lot of fun. One particularly memorable bit where all the naughty kids got together and had a fake meeting where they did satirical bits, pretending to be the more pompous members of the community. Which is a pretty impressive bit of roleplaying, really - playing a character who is also playing a character.

As Mender, I was the closest thing to a doctor we had. Which came into play more deeply when the person playing Fetcher decided to break her leg and arm with a day to go of the larp. We hadn't interacted much - her role was to fetch water from the upper floors. But suddenly I was the default caretaker - setting the break, binding it up, helping her settle and caretaking - and also talking about how her identity was threatened by no longer being able to do her job.

I also cared for a few other people - which largely consisted, in roleplay terms, of draping a scarf over them to prevent them from getting cold. Which did at some points mean I was scrambling back and forth to find my previous scarf so I could myself stay warm, after having given away a different one.

Oh right, also giving it to Fetcher to bite on when I set the break, definitely a bit where I was mentally going "well, if you're up for putting it in your mouth then I don't mind..."

Another big element were the journals. Scribe was the Child who wrote journals, to record events that have happened to our community. They were writing in the latest one, and they had a few that they had written in the year or two before the larp started. And then, over the course of the larp, we found many more. The revelations within these obviously caused us to question some truths we believed about the world and our place in them. There were also some photos and notes we found as well. This was a great way to regulate the progress of the plot, without being didactic about what response we should have these revelations. And, too, these journals were often found when Children went exploring, or had dramatic blackbox scenes. So they were a nice way to reward that kind of play with something that would add to the drama for the whole community.

And then, later on, we found the journal that related Scribe losing the memory of who they used to be, and becoming Scribe, trapped and accepting of their place in the House. Most of the journals they would read out loud to the rest of the Children, but this one was too much for them to bear, and they had to ask someone else to read it.

(also, wow, they must have been a lot of work to write!)

This section is about the ending, so skip it if you think you might play this. Not that there are currently plans to run it again, but...

Anyway, it was very good & effective. A flood long foretold was suddenly upon us. I realised what was happening, and ran from it. And then, up the stairs, realised that while everyone was streaming after - what about Fletcher? She couldn't move without help.

We huddled upstairs, waiting for it to pass. Our familiar halls were deep underwater, we could see the blue light from the top of the stairs. Fear, loss & disruption, but a sense that we were all in this together. Cold, everyone wet and no way to get dry. We can hear the pounding of the waves below.

And then they subsided, and an unfamilar noise came to us. A sound of... breaking? Mechanical, maybe?

And then suddenly, our tribe was visited by police officers. Not that we had any concept of police officers. They were people we'd never seen before, something that was not within the memory of any of us there. Barking official commands, wanting to know how many of us there were, un-used to our language and ways. Hustled us downstairs, sat us down, fed us cold chips and ketchup, handed us dossiers with our histories and told us we had 5 minutes to decide whether to forever leave our home, the only place we had any memory of.

And actually let me talk about the chips. They were cold, as I said. And with ketchup. And it was such a delight to eat chips from within the perspective of a character who had no memory of them. To dip my fingers in the ketchup and taste it with curiosity. It took me a while to try out dipping the chips directly. So strange, this food! And talking while we ate, but the whole thing felt so unfamiliar, it didn't feel like a violation.

And a dossier with lots of writing, some clarifying the role of the Ancestors and what had happened to them. And some telling me about a person who was supposed to be me (I can't, now, remember the name I was supposed to have). Phrases I didn't understand: "payment in arrears", "mortgage foreclosure", "job interview". I didn't know what this was about, and I didn't want to know.

A choice: to stay or to go. 2 minutes to decide, no big discussion. I knew I was staying. I knew many people I loved would be leaving. I sought them out to say goodbye. Deep farewells. A gift given to me. Most people left. I stood with Poet to watch them go. After a while, we were pulled back to the few that remained, huddling on the floor. We clung onto each other, weeping. A close community of 35, now reduced to 6. How would we survive? The loss of all our friends.

The players leaving told me later that it was very affecting to see us sprawled like that. Almost like we were a Renaissance painting, limbs, faces visible, extremes of emotion but also very still.

And then... the end. Shake it off. Change your clothes, try to step out of your characters. Some rituals to help re-enter this world, decompress from the fiction. And a party.

Okay, that's your lot. I have more I could write - stories from the larp and reflections on how larp works as a larger practice. But in the interests of getting this posted, this will do for now.

Oh wait - there is one more thing I haven't said. Which is a deep deep thank you to the larp-runners, the crew, and to everyone I played with.

[1: but not when I'm posting it, this took a long time to get finished. I did the larp at the end of August]

[2: Since writing this, I have listened to the audiobook, after not having read the book for a few years. and the feeling I get is that Susanna Clarke would also be tempted by this. On the other hand, I think my conviction has wavered with time away. there's probably a moral necessity to not turn away from knowledge? But on the other hand, the two things that really kept me to the House were sublime beauty and the warmth of community... which are hard to argue with. ]

[3: But apparently more of this happened than I was aware of - which makes sense, really]

[4: I find this comment symbolic of the degree of care and forethought that the runners had for the players]

okay, for context: Keir Starmer recently announced a "BritCard" system, which would be good for reporting potholes & being mean to immigrants

and, like, those arguments for an ID card are not designed to appeal to me. but we have had this discussion before, and so i have some kind of a sense of the arguments for an ID card. as i recall, when people say ID card, they actually mean at least two distinct things:

1. a physical card that you can carry around, which has your picture on it and can tell people you are who you say you are, and how old you are etc. maybe it's compulsory to carry this around if you leave the house?
2. a government database which has some kind of unique identifier for all the people resident in the country, and which all the other government databases can use when they want to refer to a person
   and the arguments for and against the two are quite different

now as a trans person existing at the present time, i have a particular feeling about both of these, which is fear. for the physical card, if it has a gender marker on it then we now have an angle for bigots to ask people who have a non-gender conforming appearance for proof that they really are the gender they're claiming to be. seems bad? and the database part, well, i can't imagine that in the current climate they're going to introduce a new authoritative system with an easy and relaxed attitude to changing your gender marker. also seems bad.

anyway, this isn't what i came here to talk about. instead, as presaged by the title, i had a thought about the British national character[1] and why it might resist one of these two parts. no, i'm not going to claim that we have an instinctive resistance to tyranny. we love asking people for their papers. it's instead about the database bit, and the plan to make it simpler.

it's my feeling that a British person, confronted with a system with a long and complicated history, and different parts working a little bit at cross purposes to each other, and odd wrinkles that happened by chance that have now become load bearing, and that is clearly not quite fit for the purpose it has been put to... well, they might take a kind of perverse delight in seeing it? some people would see this and go "well, this needs cleaning up"... but there's something in a particular British mind which is like: how can i lean into the contradictions. how can i make this worse.

i think about the way that railway ticketing works. i don't actually understand how railway ticketing works. but i do understand that in the UK, it is possible for a regular ticket for a train between A and B, passing through station C, to be more expensive than the sum of a ticket between A and C and a ticket between C and B. and that both would be valid on the route, even if you don't actually get off the train. it's called split ticketing, and many of the ticket booking apps will automatically do this for you. i look at this situation and i know that it is bad and that a system without these problems would be better, and yet there is a part of me that goes "oh, how glorious! i wonder if there are other treasures to find in the ticketing regulations"

and even when these things personally inconvenience me, like when HMRC and Companies House had different ideas about the dormancy status of the company i work under -- there's still something in me that enjoys the mess of it all. the perversity. and that part feels British?

sidebar here to note that the thing about complicated situations is that they require complicated solutions. and that it is hard to tell what complexity is essential and what is incidental when confronted with a running system. people of all nationalities preserve messy contradictory systems when they encounter them, because sweeping them away forcefully and instinctually very quickly leads you to disaster. but! if you want to read too much into it, then i would note that the truths in this paragraph belong to the area of study called "cybernetics" and one of the main theorists of cybernetics, especially when applied to human systems, was a guy called Stafford Beer, who was British. so his drive to look at complicated messy systems with a kind of affectionate interest could also be chalked up in part to this same British tendency.

anyway – this part of the British national character, it looks at the idea of instituting an ID card database, sweeping away all the glorious complexity of the previous systems, the bit where your passport, your doctor, your local council and your library can all have quite different ideas as to what your name, address and gender are and yet occasionally still connect between them... and it sees the potential for beauty to be swept away.

btw i liked this post on the ID card thing:

Unpacking Digital ID - can the government deliver on its ambitions? — Careful Industries

A look at what has been proposed, how it might work, and whether it will be effective.

Careful IndustriesRachel Coldicutt

[1] i'm running with this as if the idea of a national character is a real thing. i mean it clearly is. but also it's very much one of these "the difference within groups is larger than the difference between groups" type of thing. don't take it too seriously, you know?

I continue to be in Scotland! Right now I am on a train on my way to Edinburgh, but yesterday I was at the Glasgow Indie Games Festival. What a nice event! Friendly people, a showcase of games (some I knew, some I didn't), someone doing face painting, a bar in the main space, live music, talks... and a Downpour workshop. Run by me!

It's always a joy to run these - the typical setup is that I run through how the software works, making a stupid little game where people (who I pick on in the audience) pull faces. Then everyone is set loose on some crafting supplies - things to cut out illustrations for collage, coloured pens and pencils, paper, whatever else seems like a creative thing to make images with. Then everyone just... does some crafting. This is the real aim of the workshops, giving people a space to create with their hands, to make something small and silly and have it finished. And the bit where you have to do stuff with your phone, where you actually make the game and upload it... that's kinda just the context that gives you an excuse.

Anyway, this time we had a slightly shorter slot and everyone was finishing at different times, so it didn't make sense to call people up to show their games off to each other on the big screen. So as a substitute, I said I'd do a little roundup of the games people made. And this is that roundup.

First up, the story of a Minoan Bronze. Or is it?

The transformation of a butterfly

This is the game that had the most impressive real world bit of construction. Single-handedly justifying bringing along some crepe paper

I love these illustrations. Makes me really want to do the setup so people can make paper doll games with Downpour

"Dad, you always make games about submarines"

Cronch cronch

Why can't I click on the shoe??? That's clearly Mairi's shoe!

And finally, my personal favourite, a tale of dinosaurs and real estate.

Okay I think that's all the games that people made! If you made a game but I missed it, let me know and I'll add it! Thanks to everyone who came along and made stuff - a joy to show you Downpour.

It's 8:20am, and I'm sitting in a tiny waiting room at Balloch station, just north of Glasgow. It was a little hard to spot the station because it only has a single line running into it, and it doesn't run out again. There's 4 seats in the waiting room, and they're all positioned to stare directly at the man behind the ticket desk. I did not plan to be here today.

I was supposed to be going up to Harris today. An early coach from Glasgow up to Uig, which is a 7 hour trip - I think I saw that it's the longest named bus route in the country? It's a long way, anyway. Then the ferry over to Tarbert, to join my dad & stepmum for the week. Despite living in Scotland for 4 years for university, I never made it out to the islands - barely made it out to the highlands. So this was (is?) a chance to rectify that.

I was more nervous about today's travel than I have been about any travel for a while. I think it's that it involved travelling in places badly served by public transport, with public transport. I'm used to travelling to cities, places where if your plans go wrong you can just spend some money and fix things. I'm used to arriving in an airport in a foreign country and going – huh, guess I better figure out how to get to wherever I'm staying from here! I quite like that, absorbing context clues and puzzling out a foreign system. Like a big videogame you're stuck inside. But this felt... well, I guess I just had less confidence that if I fucked up I wouldn't end up stranded in the countryside with a wheely suitcase and nowhere to stay for the night. Higher stakes makes it less of a game.

Anyway! The stressing paid off, because it meant I did enough preparation for things to go wrong in a gentle way. In the event, it turns out that today is the day that Storm Floris hit, with the peak of the winds hitting at approximately the time the ferry was scheduled to depart. But I'd subscribed to the text alerts for the ferry and got notice through yesterday that it might get cancelled. And then, this morning, as the coach wound its way up past Loch Lomond, I got a text through: yep, definitely cancelled.

So I got off at the next stop and... now I'm making my way back to Glasgow & my Dad's flat there. Half an hour's wait for a bus, then a train back to Glasgow, then the little underground service back. Definitely could have been worse!

And then I need to decide whether to try again tomorrow. I'll be coming back Friday anyway - I have a workshop to give at the Glasgow Indie Games Fest on Saturday. Or alternatively I could relax and maybe see some more fringe shows, see if I can meet with some folks I thought I'd miss on this trip... I reckon I ought to have a nap first.

I'm travelling for most of August, complicated travel with a bunch of moving parts. This is also one reason I'm more anxious than usual, all the logistics feel knotted together into a bigger tangle than usual. My health has been pretty good recently, but over the course of the train up to Glasgow I went from feeling fine to feeling wretched - maybe I'm going to blame the leaning Pendelino trains they have on the west coast for setting off a stomach that was a little unsettled already. So since arriving I've had to prioritise lying down and making some serious progress through Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. Not that this is a real hardship, it's a banger of a book - just some fantastic funny character work through the various narrators over the course of the book. Although some of the twists are... not the most plausible. I admit I don't have direct experience, but I'm pretty sure that's not how O____ works!

But I did make it out yesterday - a jaunt over to Edinburgh to catch up with my friend Alice and catch some shows with her. We saw two shows - the first was a funny gentle show about The Diggers and historical reenactment and a Brighton council estate near some chalk hills. I say gentle but it had me in tears - the kind most easily produced by demonstrations of care. Maybe I mean charming. Then we wandered on to Dovecot Studios, where we saw:

• an exhibition about IKEA fabric patterns. Nice to see all the sketches (I love seeing design sketches) and think about patterns and design – but I think it was a bit too corporate to justify paying money to see. Maybe if you're a real IKEA head.

• some nice jewellery. For sale, and for surprisingly cheap!

• some paintings & prints & tapestries by Victoria Crowe. Some beautiful stuff - there's a big tapestry, not on show there, that was done in undyed wool, the shades just coming from the variation in breeds. And nice to see the printmaking, the attention to the natural world, light, etc.
• and my favourite, although I have no picture of it - a nice view into the working tapestry studio, where you could see a giant tapestry seemingly completed, but not removed from the loom, and a woman working away at a smaller tapestry. God what an endeavour a tapestry is.

We went back to Alice's flat, where her cat Hilda was very brave and stayed under the coffee table while I sat there drinking my tea. I would look down sometimes and see her round eyes staring up at me, the rest of her body just a silhouette where the pattern of the carpet was obscured by darkness. What a creature.

And then we went out to see a clown show! Furiozo, who puts on the clown olympics (on again on the 18th!) which Alice is obsessed with, and I am by proxy. The show is some great classic clowning - but he plays a Eastern European hard man, raving, threatening violence, driving his beamer, etc. Very Anora. But also he is very clown the whole time. It's a good dynamic. We sat at the front, so I was brought up on stage - he proceeded to cut a literally comically large line of "coke", then snort it with a vacuum cleaner. Then it was my turn:

What a fantastic show, if you are about and into clowning then I very much recommend it. I'm also gonna keep an eye out and see if he does any clown workshops back in London.

Anyway – in the process of writing this I have arrived back at the flat, so I will sign off again – maybe some more rest would do me good, or maybe I'll be bored and at a loose end once I finish the last few pages of The Moonstone. Maybe it hinges on whether I'm likely to get some good views if I see through that same bus journey tomorrow. We'll see!

In a vague continuation of my previous things to read collections, I started gathering articles I'd come across that I thought were worthy of sharing. Then I started grouping them. And now I might even have a thesis?

So we start with this piece:

The Politics of Humiliation

The politics of humiliation has moved to the center of the reactionary project under Trump II.

Liberal CurrentsToby Buckle

which is pretty long and academic but I think captures something important about the present day rise of fascism. Here's a few pull quotes to illustrate where it goes:

Once people get a taste for humiliating, they will fight very hard to be able to keep doing it. Like an addiction, the competitively powerful will often put this urge above all else and behave in profoundly self-destructive ways to chase it. People with others beneath them in a racial caste system almost always prioritize maintaining it over their own economic, social, or cultural interests.

Right populism is driven by the desire to humiliate, left populism by not wanting to be humiliated.

And to connect this to AI, we have this extremely unsurprising story:

Men Are Creating AI Girlfriends and Then Verbally Abusing Them

A grisly trend has emerged: users who create AI partners, act abusive toward them, and post the toxic interactions online.

FuturismAshley Bardhan

And this is extreme, but the point of AI is not just to achieve tasks, but to give the simulacra of having a servant. Someone who will endlessly try to please, someone who you can be cruel or polite to without fear that they will respond to you in kind. I was always pretty sceptical of people saying "I think it's important to say please and thank you to Alexa, just to remember how to behave properly", but maybe I was wrong.

A post that also connects:

Using this lens of humiliation, what does this give us? People who routinely humiliate service workers now might instead think of themself as a potential or former service worker, and treat others more humanely. It's struck a chord.

And you can go darker when connecting this to mainstream politics. Here's Liberal Currents again:

We Need to Talk About Pedocon Theory

The connection been Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein is no accident, but reveals a deep logic at the heart of reactionary politics.

Liberal CurrentsSamantha Hancox-Li

Which instead draws as it's unifying logic the desire to sexually prey on children. Horrifying, yes, but also hard to fully argue against. And it comes from the same basic logic:

Matt Walsh provides a neat summary of the fantasy, tweeting an image of a man carrying a woman and child out of Hurricane Harvey's floodwaters: "Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says." Of course, in the reactionary fantasy, these benefits are not provided for free. They are animated by a quasi-feudal vision in which other members of the family owe the father absolute obedience in return for the protection he provides.

Fundamentally, children are easier to manipulate. Children are easier to control. Children are easier to groom. Reactionaries believe that women exist to be ruled over by men and bear them children. Of course adult women—and especially educated adult women—will have their own ideas about this state of affairs. But a child you can shape, you can make totally dependent on you, emotionally, socially, financially. What else is "headship" but an argument for pedophilia?

It's not just about power, it's about having absolute power. Being able to subject other people to it.

You might well have seen this next article linked before:

Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE | Yanis Varoufuckice

This is a disgusting country, I thought, irredeemable visually, psychically, morally, and ethically, and whatever is likable about our people’s warm patter does not in any way forgive what we have done to the world. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to bring politeness and evil into view at the same time.

n+1Subscribe

He said his wife had almost been assaulted in Texas, and when she’d called the police they arrested a man who turned out to be an “illegal alien” and who was promptly deported. He said he’d seen videos of a member of the Taliban getting into an argument at a fast-food restaurant in California (I couldn’t find any evidence of this—not even as a conspiracy), and that he wanted to join ICE to protect his family.

“I learned all these skills in the army—smash and grabs, site exploitation—and never got to use them,” he said. “So I’m here to kind of do what I learned to do over there, but this time here, defending my country.”

And here's the way that would be humiliators justify their aspirations.

(also, wow, what a pseudonym "Yanis Varoufuckice" is!)

And now it's time to leave America and go to Dubai:

Caitlín Doherty, Everything Else — Sidecar

In Dubai.

SidecarCaitlín Doherty

I went to Dubai wrongheaded. I learnt nothing and left nauseated. I had thought it would be fun – funny, even – to experience the disorientation of standing at the pivot point between two world systems. Instead, it was merely disorientating – sickeningly so. There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies. Its hellishness cannot be laid solely at the feet of the oligarchs, whose wealth it attracts, nor the violent organised criminals who relocate there to avoid prosecution. It is hellish because, as the self-appointed showtown of free trade, it provides normal people with the chance to buy the purest form of the most heinous commodity: the exploitation of others. If you want to know how it feels to have slaves, in the modern world – and not be blamed openly for this desire – visit Dubai. But know that you will not be blameless for doing so. Every Instagram post, every TikTok video, every gloating WhatsApp message sent from its luxury is an abomination. A PR campaign run by those who have already bought the product, and now want only to show you that they can afford it.

(what good writing!)

So where is the opposition? Here's two pieces on the failure of centrists to make headway, or even hold their ground, against the fascists. First, at home:

When Moderation Becomes Appeasement

If your chief goal is to find a middle ground with the far right on social issues, you’ll end up condoning its values—just ask Keir Starmer.

The BulwarkToby Buckle

Cross-national studies show that mainstream parties that try to compete with the far right on immigration consistently fail to achieve their goals: It doesn’t gain them votes, and it often loses them. Starmer’s strategy of constantly giving ground raises the salience of the issue; it implies that immigration really is the problem that nativists say it is, and it even legitimates the idea that regular politics has failed people. This all amounts to a complex way of validating fascists: It is effectively saying the far right has the correct concerns, the clearer view of politics, and the greater authority to hold forth on the issue.

Because reactionary centrists do not really have values, they struggle to understand the motivations of those who do. Starmer’s substantive concessions on trans issues and immigration are the most obvious thing in the world to them: He’s giving the median voter the policy they want! But the party isn’t just communicating a policy; its policy is communicating its values—and the “values” proposition is hopelessly incoherent. The government is simultaneously saying it believes and does not believe in liberal core principles. To liberals, this feels like a betrayal. To the right, Labour’s concessions appear inauthentic and pandering.

Our disagreement with fascism is, ultimately, one of values, and it is on that level that the rhetorical fight against fascism must be taken. Those to the left of the populist, nativist right must articulate a competing, values-based vision to give everyone else—and especially the complacent middle—a true alternative to reaction; they must offer a clear, compelling, and coherent story about what the sorts of lives we want people to be free to pursue, and what type of society we want to have to support those dreams. And part of this story will be about just how dangerous, how utterly society-destroying, the far right’s story is. What policy views people can be persuaded to support will follow this conversation, not the other way around.

And back in America:

Democrats Are at a Historic Low Point. A Certain Kind of Advice Brought Them Here—and They Can’t Stop Listening to It.

During the Reagan revolution, Democrats settled on a new way to win—and it’s destroying them now.

SlateBen Mathis-Lilley

“The core work of what a party does—determining what the message is, what does the party stand for, what policies does it pursue, what are the public rationales it offers—all those things have been outsourced,” Martin said. There is still a party machine, of sorts, in that Democratic decisionmaking is disproportionately controlled by a certain group of powerful individuals, like the ones who were accused of putting their thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and helping cover up Joe Biden’s decline in 2024. But now those figures are part of a “blob” (that’s another Hollow Parties term) of consultants and fundraisers clustered on the coasts who have neither formal obligations to nor channels of communication with the vast majority of Democratic voters.

Message testing can’t tell you how to handle contradictory or volatile voter beliefs—the public tends to say it supports both increased government spending andsmaller government, for instance, and has shifted its position on whether there should be more or less immigration 10 times in the past 10 years. It can’t tell you, in the event that you enact a useful policy, how to make sure voters notice its effects and associate them with Democrats; conversely, it doesn’t tell you anything about the potential consequences of winning office and failing to follow through on something that you claimed, during your campaign, to support. Shor’s tests regularly find support for unambiguously liberal messages about taking on corporate special interests and raising taxes on the wealthy, but when Democrats actually hold power, this commitment somehow always ends up getting stuck to the bottom of the desk drawer.

Public opinion can be fluid; a party that wants to succeed in the long term—and especially one that bears the burden, in a two-party system, of maintaining a functional country—needs to have priorities besides winning the next election. With these truths in mind, Democrats have a choice. They could put their heads together to make an educated guess about what the country might look like, think like, and need out of its government in 2028, then conduct themselves accordingly for the next three years. Or they could spend several hundred million dollars to find out again that the middle class likes the phrase “lift up the middle class.” Which do you think they’re more likely to choose?

Okay, enough with staring into the void. Time to link some stuff that's hopeful. This mindset is not the only way to think. There is a better way to live! Social status is not purely zero-sum. People can be good to be around! Loneliness and isolation is not obligatory.

A Pro-Human Manifesto

Behold! I have had a thought.

Young VulgarianMarie Le Conte

Just like that essay on humiliation, this starts with recounting childhood bullying:

I still can't really make sense of what happened next. I said some words, following everyone's lead, and the girls decided to pretend they'd not been playing that game at all, and were shocked to hear me say such bad things, and they went to report me to the teacher, who duly told me off. Had they lured me in for the specific purpose of eventually betraying my trust, and getting me grounded? I'll never find out. I can't think of another reason why they did what they did. I can't think of a reason why such small children would behave in such a vicious way.

But, rather than staying in that mindset, instead, she chooses instead to talk to people, to live within the world:

I love my friends but I love my acquaintances as well; I know so many of my neighbours, and the people who run my local businesses, and it can be hard for me to leave the house without exchanging at least a few words with someone, somewhere. I've no idea who I would be without all of them. I can't imagine what navigating the many lows of the past few years would have been if I'd remained alone.

Anyway, it's a great essay on the value of human connection, the sheer joy of it in and of itself.

On the subject of connection, here's a story from 1989 which is just... the story of someone's life:

Sailors meet two very exotic San Diego women

--

San Diego ReaderMary Lang

Across the street from the sailors’ apartment was an old but unfinished house. You couldn’t see it from the street; it was shrouded in pepper trees, bougainvillea, morning glories. The house belonged to a person who called herself Corsica Bascurain de Kuprinska, an old woman with white hair and thick black mascara. The sailor figured she must have been in her late 50s. An aged, would-be Paloma Picasso. A quasi bruja. A painter who didn’t paint anymore, just drank rot-gut gallon bottles of Cribari burgundy. She chain-smoked Delicados. Her speech was laced with insults, and her insults were laced with words like “bureaucrat,” “Nixon,” and “ cochino .” Like the building inspector, who would come around once in a while.

Just great writing, and exemplifying, if not talking about, caring about other people's lives.

And here's a review for the new Superman film (which I liked):

Superman (2025) - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

****/****starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Nicholas Hoult, Edi Gathegiwritten and directed by James Gunn by Walter Chaw I’m in the bag for Superman, I admit it. I grew up in a small town, Golden, CO, in an environment some would describe as Norman Rockwellian. Before the bullying started in earnest, before I spoke English, I would earn pennies at the corner barbershop and spend them at the 5 & 10 across the street on Silly Putty, gum, and comic books. Superman comic books, Wonder Woman, too. Superman, for me, is the superhero we should most want to be. I’m not…

FILM FREAK CENTRALBill Chambers

Superman is an alien in every sense of the word, raised with what we have mythologized as traditional values in rural America, sent to spread the gospel of doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do. When he matures, he braves the sin and seductions of the Big City, the mortal city, the Fritz Langian Metropolis, which, whatever its faults, still has a newspaper that aspires to journalism in 2025. There, he falls in love with the creatures he was entrusted to protect. All of them. He sees value in everyone because he is the most alien of anyone. Some people would like to frighten you away from places where you’re forced to consider the broad diversity of mankind as human beings–colleges and cities, for example. Did you ever wonder why?

All of these pieces make the case for a life lived not in dominance and fear, but with open curiosity, compassion for others.

Okay, that's your lot, that's what I've been thinking about recently. Some good writing, some interesting arguments, a thesis for the shape of the world as-is.

Oh, wait, here's a post-script. A bit from that Marie Le Conte piece that I think needs more emphasis:

Of course, it requires more work, but that's the entire point. It's easy and tempting to opt for solitude because nothing is more straightforward than lying to yourself, sometimes even without realising that you're doing it.

It's work, and scary work, to talk to people and exist in the world and not be isolated. It's safer to seek an AI "relationship", because there's no fear of rejection there. Lockdowns, and algorithms, and the apps, and an increasingly atomised society... they get us out of the habit of talking to other people, of valuing human contact on non-commercial terms. Important to push back against, just on personal terms - but if our political futures hang on society to be more pro-social in fundamental ways... I feel deeply unsure about that happening any time soon.

it was pretty cool to see! here's some scattered thoughts:

• the former Olympic zone is a weird place. simultaneously desolate, difficult to navigate, pleasant & full of little bars, and oppressively corporate. people are trying so hard to produce some vibes, but unfortunately half of them are people with too much money drawing up plans in climate controlled offices elsewhere.
• it's cool to see some of the workings of the museum. here's how stuff is packed, here's a forklift, here's someone sorting out some hangers in the conservation room, here's an explanation of the museum's numbering system...

• and also catalog systems are pretty fascinating, just thinking about maintaining a database for 200 years is a big thought to have, even without the worry of having to keep all that metadata connected to a big pile of physical objects. you start to understand why they used to just write the numbers on the object!
• turns out a museum can be a good time even without an exhibition or a narrative or an organising throughline. you can just... look at stuff & go "oh! that's cool!". and if you wanna find out more you can look at the catalog number on the tag & look it up on the website.
• (placeholder for a link to a post about other people visiting the science museum stores, which are even more of this experience, and much less of a place intended primarily for visiting)
• but nevertheless curators can't help themselves, and so there were a number of plaques, explanatory signs, outreach projects, thoughtful juxtapositions, installed galleries with particular things on display, full rooms recreated to understand them in context, etc. i did like how the initial impression was that there was just gonna be stuff, and it was only after you looked at the stuff for a while that the curation started impinging on you.
• but i was reminded of how so much of the learning that is done in these kinds of spaces is done via visitors talking to their friends and family and sharing their experiences with the work. there was a installed instance of the Frankfurt kitchen and seeing it made me talk about how cool it was to see to my friend Arlo... similarly some work by Lee Kang-So which got me to nerd out about pottery sculpture techniques. (this thought also connected to the work thing we had secondarily met up to talk about)

• but maybe i'd learn more from the online catalog if their wifi worked better
• and too, this collective exchange is not just "what this is" but also making sense of it. i appreciated the conversation i overheard about Robin Hood Gardens, talking about how it felt overly voyeuristic. i didn't agree, i think the domestic always feels intimate, and i think there's a lot of value in collecting and treasuring the mundane. mainly watching it i thought about my place, and i thought about all the flats that i had seen when i was attempting to buy it. i thought about the particular style of internal door handle, how i didn't really like it, but that seeing it in this context made me appreciate the heritage it suggests.

• also i collected some funny faces i saw around the place. who's your pal?

• it was pretty busy! we went on a random Tuesday afternoon & had to search for a locker to put our bag in.
• oh yeah, they (reasonably) are stricter than a museum usually is about people taking in bags or food or drink. funny moment passing a member of staff talking into a walkie-talkie: couple standing in the atrium... in the center, on the glass... they have a bag of skittles... they are *eating*... do you copy?
• the cafe: i'm not a big fan of museum cafes, they're generally expensive & loud. i did not find this one an exception. but also it was fine.
• oh! and we played a fun game with the pull out panels of fabric samples near the cafe. pull out one, and try to guess where it was made and how old it is. (the safe answer is : England, 1830s). possibly this game would be less fun if either of us was an expert on fabric history. or even more fun again if both of us were. it's nice to play these kinds of games, i think.

Most of these posts have a wide intended audience, but for this one – you know if you're in the market for it.

Don't start by reading this blog post

The places to learn about writing setFunction calls for Hydra are:

• the documentation (obviously):

custom glsl

custom glsl # Using custom GLSL functions # Hydra is built using GLSL (a language for generating a program, or shader, that runs directly on the graphics card using WebGl). Each javascript function in hydra corresponds directly to a snippet of shader code. There are four possible types in hydra: src, coord (geometry), combine (blend), combineCoord (modulate). Each string of functions is composited based on its type into a single string of fragment shader code.

hydra video synth

• as the documentation suggests, looking over the built in shader sources:

hydra-synth/src/glsl/glsl-functions.js at main · hydra-synth/hydra-synth

Synth engine for hydra. Contribute to hydra-synth/hydra-synth development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHubhydra-synth

• going onto the Hydra discord & searching for particular things:

Join the hydra video synth Discord Server!

Check out the hydra video synth community on Discord - hang out with 3221 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

Discord

• looking at the sources of other people's custom Hydra functions. Here's a good place to start, although there's a bunch more scattered around here:

lib/all.js · main · Thomas Jourdan / Extra shaders for Hydra · GitLab

Additional fragment shaders for the live coding environment Hydra.

GitLabstrom

• fucking around, trying things, seeing what happens. I do this too little, I think. It's especially informative to look at the generated shaders and see how they've been put together. See the next step for details.

How to tell if you've fucked up

The shader will start glitching back and forth between two frames. It'll look broken, but in a less exciting way than you were going for. You go to the inspector, switch to the console tab and then look for these two lines:

As the second line suggests, you'll only get this once until you refresh the page.

Probably you're wondering... okay, but how do I tell what I've fucked up. Here's my workflow, although it's not the most convenient:

1) Get the Hydra code that's calling your new function. Let's say it's something like this:

osc()
.coolFunc(17)
.out(o0);

You wanna edit it so it looks something like this:

console.log(
  osc()
  .coolFunc(17)
  .glsl()[0].frag
);

2) Run that code

3) Look in the console and you can see the generated shader source.

4) Now to figure out what's wrong with it. Maybe you can tell by looking? Looking and thinking, that's what coding is all about.

5) I personally paste it in here: https://evanw.github.io/glslx/ Probably I should set this up so it runs in a code editor & I can do some stuff there?

Types of input

So if you look at the docs or the built in functions, you will see a lot of functions which take float as an argument. Almost all, in fact! And this makes sense, there's lots of fun stuff that works when you're passing in floats - you have the array syntax which sequences the input, you can smooth it, it's easy to do maths on it...

But that's not all you can pass. Check this out:

setFunction({
    name: 'matExample',
    type: 'src',
    inputs: [
        { name: 'm', type: 'mat3', default: "mat3(1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1)"}
    ],
    glsl: `
    return vec4(m[0][0], m[0][1], m[0][2], 1);
`})

That's right, you can pass in a matrix (of course, we're not doing anything interesting with the matrix... that's your job).

How do we call this? If we try to pass in an array then we trigger the clever sequencing logic. Well, I'm not sure if there's a smarter way. But this works:

matExample("mat3(1,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,1)").out(o0);

Hello magenta!

Sampling

What else might we wanna pass? Well, if we wanna do something where we're taking multiple texture samples, like a blur or whatever, then we're gonna want a sampler2d. There is of course an example of this in the default functions, it's good old src() . Let's have a look at that:

{
  name: 'src',
  type: 'src',
  inputs: [
    {
      type: 'sampler2D',
      name: 'tex',
      default: NaN,
    }
  ],
  glsl:
`   //  vec2 uv = gl_FragCoord.xy/vec2(1280., 720.);
   return texture2D(tex, fract(_st));`
},

Funny to see commented out code from an earlier version in there. Anyway, yeah, we can do the same thing ourselves! To make a function that looks like this: blur(s1) (note: not blur(src(s1)). Or indeed src(s1).blur()). We want this to be a src type of function so we know _st is available, and also just because it makes sense - it's always going to be at the start of a chain of functions.

I haven't experimented with the full range of possible inputs, but understanding how to pass in stuff that isn't a float took me some time, so hopefully this is helpful to others. I think other things should work similarly - falling back to passing the value as a string if needed.

Of course, the other way to sample is to read from tex0 from somewhere else in the chain. This will, if the chain contains a texture read, read from that same sample. But it'll break if you're not doing any texture reads anywhere else. So I don't recommend it, even if it makes the code a bit nicer in form. Thomas Jourdan's convolution shaders seem to do this, and this is why they sometimes don't work if you aren't also doing feedback stuff.

Also worth noticing when doing sampling is the resolution uniform. We can correct for the size of the screen! Make shaders which correct for the aspect ratio automatically (uh, although they will make assumptions about the lack of transformations earlier in the chain)

Although...

Hydra doesn't re-evaluate width & height? it should!

This is just a moan as I run down through my list of notes. Hydra doesn't seem to re-evaluate the builtin variables width and height! A pain if you wanna play with window size. Or maybe it makes sense given setResolution exists. Anyway, you can listen for the window resize event and set stuff yourself if you need to. But it was a surprise to me.

And yes, this affects the resolution uniform.

Helper functions

One thing I've spotted going through the built in function source is this bit of mangled code:

{
  name: 'sum',
  type: 'color',
  inputs: [
    {
      type: 'vec4',
      name: 'scale',
      default: 1,
    }
  ],
  glsl:
`   vec4 v = _c0 * s;
   return v.r + v.g + v.b + v.a;
   }
   float sum(vec2 _st, vec4 s) { // vec4 is not a typo, because argument type is not overloaded
   vec2 v = _st.xy * s.xy;
   return v.x + v.y;`
},

Can you see what's up? The glsl includes a close bracket and a new function declaration. If we try to use this, we find that the generated shader is invalid... but it doesn't need to be?

One limitation of the way you declare new functions is that you can include helper functions that you can call from your functions. When converting shaders I've written elsewhere, manually inlining these turns out to be a bunch of work. Can we take advantage of the textual mangling that Hydra is built on and sneak something in like this:

setFunction({
    name: 'withHelper',
    type: 'src',
    inputs: [
    ],
    glsl: `
    return otherFunc();
    }
    
    vec4 otherFunc() {
    	return vec4(1,0,0,1);
`})


withHelper().out(o0);

The answer is no. It generates something sensible:

  vec4 withHelper(vec2 _st) {
      
    return otherFunc();
    }
    
    vec4 otherFunc() {
    	return vec4(1,0,0,1);

  }

          

  void main () {
    vec4 c = vec4(1, 0, 0, 1);
    vec2 st = gl_FragCoord.xy/resolution.xy;
    gl_FragColor = withHelper(st);
  }

But alas, we need to declare otherFunc before we use it. So we'd have to rely on adding the helper function with a different setFunction call than the one we're using it with... which feels too fragile to actually use, for me. Maybe there's a way? Let me know if you figure it out. Or if you've fixed up Hydra so helper functions can get defined, that too.

Okay, I think that's the tidied up version of a bunch of my notes. Hope this is helpful to someone! Maybe just to me, later on!

Adam Saltsman has a term he's started using, "corgispace". Let's quote him on what that means:

(this whole thread is worth reading, click through)

It's about working with the grain of the material. It's about saying "hm, that's hard, let's not do that". It's about finding the dumb hacky way to do it, because you are making a finite thing.

Here's another Adam quote:

It's about keeping iteration times short. It's about working in such a way where you can see the effects of your actions. So you can try a goofy thing and then see where it goes, rather than having to make sure it's gonna be worthwhile ahead of time.

(I think a bunch about the corrosive effect on a project when every change has to be put through a ticketing system. Compare to the BOTW thing of adding notes directly in the world)

I think about seeing the Sokpop showcase at AMAZE this year, and about how a bunch of the games were broken or crashed sometimes, just logic errors or edge cases getting hit. They worked well enough to be fun, to be playable, to be something that you could derive a large quantity of joy from. But also, in a expo environment where they ran for hours on end without being reset, they sometimes had issues. Crashes, glitches, whatever. Because that's not what they optimised for. They optimised for making 100 games. And for those games to be fun, or interesting, or whatever that particular game was trying to do. And... I mean, isn't that the right way to do it?

I think this is a really powerful way to work. I want to work in this way more.

But!

I find myself inevitably attracted to the boundaries of the space. I wonder what things are within reach, and what things are tall. I think about what height comes from convention and expectations, and what height comes from technical limitations, and what height comes from the natural structure of human nature and physical reality. I think about what shape things could be if some of these things were changed, and what work would be involved in changing some of these things.

I think about building ramps. I think about all the places a corgi could go if a ramp was added. Like... the sofa. Or upstairs. Or on the bed. I think about what these things metaphorically map to. The games you could play on top of the kitchen counters. There's cool stuff up there! I'm not entirely sure it's safe for the corgi, and I'm not entirely sure what the corgi would do up there... but that's part of what makes it interesting.

There's different types of tool, right? There's tools which make previously impossible things possible (like the Large Hadron Collider). There's tools which make expensive things cheaper (like swiss roll production lines). There are tools which allow professionals to be more expressive (like theremins). And there are tools which allow people who aren't interested in complicated things to do more things than they can before (like Downpour). I'm most interested in this last type of tool. But to build this type of tool, you need to use a bunch of the other types of tool. So it's worth keeping an eye on all of these, to see if suddenly there's something cool that someone's placed just out of these reach of all these damn corgis.

And the thing about building a ramp is that once you have built one ramp, tons of corgis can get up there. It can have a big effect! A second order effect, for sure. But think of all the corgis doing cool new things with this space that they wouldn't have gotten to otherwise!

Building ramps isn't the only way to do this, of course - you can also be a corgi who does cool shit and inspires other corgis. Or you could host Crufts, and help show all the other corgis what cool stuff other corgis are doing. This metaphor is getting increasingly tortured, but what I mean here is that curation and community organising is a powerful way to affect the culture of a creative community. This point was the end section to my recent talk about making creative tools, which you can watch here.

Anyway

Ramps, am I right? And thinking about what spaces a corgi can get to, what a corgi might do there. The statespace of possibility that a new tool opens up. The way you never really know until you actually see a corgi play around up there, but also you can have a sense of it.

But on the other side...

Maybe I want to be a corgi, go to the places which are easy to get to. Get good at running around at ground level. Get fast at trying new things, and not getting stuck on the perfect thing, just out of reach.

I can operate in either mode. But it's probably useful to be intentional about what mode I'm in at any particular moment.

Or maybe I need to make more ramps while staying in corgi-mode?

Bonus Round

I haven't watched this interview with Adam Saltsman yet, but I will:

Also here's the tweet version of this post:

Wow what a messy post this is, it is an undigested thought trying to connect to a thousand different places. Let's hope writing it helps digest the thoughts.

Oh, even more further reading, here's a new thread responding to this post:

Well, that's a funny story. I was at university, up in Edinburgh, studying Cognitive Science - you probably don't know what that is, but for me it was kind of a mix of psychology and AI. After school I'd gone onto university - I'd got good grades and I don't think I had seriously considered not going. Just the thing you did. I'd applied for mainly psychology courses, but the two I'd picked as my main choice and my backup were both Cognitive Science - I was basically thinking of it as "psychology, but with computers". And when I got there, it turns out I liked it a lot - it started with a lot of required courses to give a grounding in all the different fields, but by the end you could pick what to focus on pretty freely. I got to make robots and experiment on crickets and learn about a whole bunch of different stuff. I even snuck in an architecture course, just because I could.

Anyway, there was this summer programme I'd heard about, called Dare To Be Digital. Basically what it was was that you applied as a team, and if you get in they'd put you up in Dundee for 6 weeks and you'd make a game together. Some friends I knew from my computer science courses asked me if I wanted to apply with them, so I said yes. Not a huge fan of group projects, but getting to make a videogame sounded pretty nice, so. And I didn't have any pressing plans for my summer.

Anyway, the day rolled round where we heard back and ... we were rejected. Bummer. I felt pretty bitter about the whole thing - I remember going to the showcase and thinking I could have done better than them. But time went on and I started to get over myself. The rules of it were that you could apply between any two years of university, or you could apply to do it immediately after you'd graduated. I was now in my final year, so I had one last change. I got together with the same group of friends, and we applied again.

And we were rejected again!

And so that summer, I remember thinking - screw you, I don't need to get into a special programme to make a game, I can do this myself. I was staying with my friend Stephen Kyle that summer, and I remember showering at his flat when I got an idea for a game - like, what about a bullet hell game where all the enemies you were fighting were people who had played the game before.

So I started building it - this was in the early days of Unity, and they had this special web player plugin, trying to compete with Flash. I remember scripting it in Boo, their now long deprecated Python-like language, and making a little PHP backend to receive and send files containing path data. They just got saved as little XML files in a folder, nothing complicated. I remember tuning it was interestingly tricky because after each tweak I'd need to play it a bunch of times to get enemies that moved in the way that the tuning implied. I added trails to emphasise the paths that the ships took, I set it to have a kind of muted colourscheme, I draw some little pixel ships and weapons. I added extra powerups, sequenced throughout each run - this meant that you generally got the new weapon just before your enemies did, which felt good. I made a little website for it, I managed to figure out how to take payments with PayPal if people wanted a downloadable copy. Oh! and I gave it a too-clever name, I called it Hell Is Other People*.

And: I was proud of my work on it. It turns out that making a self directed creative project, finishing it and releasing it and having people say good things about it – it turns out that that's a thing that I really enjoy doing. Or, enjoyment isn't even necessarily the word. Something I derive meaning from. Who knew that working on creative projects feels meaningful! But I felt a way about this that I hadn't done about hardly any of my degree.

So, then when I came down to London, still feeling kind of aimless about what I was doing with my life, I started going to the local indie games meetup. It was an exciting time for indie games! I met a load of people there who were doing really cool stuff that I wanted to get involved with. Eventually I was at one when my friend Alice O'Connor tapped me on the arm and said - hey, you've been moaning about how you want a job in games forever - go talk to that man there, he's setting up a studio. And so I did, we had a conversation there and another one at his member's club a week later, and then I handed in my notice at my current job (in telecoms), and a few weeks later I was working in the games industry.

The story obviously continues from there, but – that's my origin story. I got bitter, made a game out of spite, and then accidentally found the reward that lurks within making something you believe in. And that's what I've been chasing ever since.

[* not linking because reading writing from myself from fifteen years ago makes me cringe. But you can find stuff on it if look hard enough.]

And also about a bicycle wheel.

So, screenshots of this bad post have been going around on Bluesky:

And there are actually some good thoughts coming from it – mainly from people who are actually going, okay, but what about the second or third order effects? Here's some I saw:

And, now I'm thinking about the front wheel of my bicycle. Let me talk about that for a while.

I bought this bike because I loved my other bike too much to lock it up on the street. But also I live up some stairs, and having to carry a bicycle down some stairs stops you from wanting to pop on your bicycle for a quick trip. And yet I live a slightly annoying distance from a tube station, and from the pottery studio, and from the nice cinema, and and. So: the solution is to buy a newer cheaper bike which I lock up on the street and which is easy and accessible by my front door.

And then of course the bike I bought was a lovely pink vintage Dutch bike. Cheap, secondhand, a little rusty - but also the right size and I love it.

And I've ridden it for a few years, but recently the front wheel has had an alarming amount of play. The rubber gaskets are brittle and failing. You can sometimes see some bearings... I think that's a bad sign?

And I know that the wheels are a weird size, because I've had to replace the tyres before. So rather than try to order some online, I go to the local bike shop down my road, and ask them for a wheel. The man takes a look, says "yep, you definitely need a new wheel". But I'm tired (no pun intended) when I buy it, so when the man insists that what I need is a 700c wheel, I buy the wheel and take it home to fit.

So: this was the task today. To fit the 700c wheel, prove that it doesn't actually fit, and then return that wheel and instead get a 28 x 1½ wheel, also known in ISO standards* as a 40-635 wheel.

And in a move that reaffirms my faith in local bike shops, the (other) man happily accepts the return, introduces himself in a very pleasant soft voice, and says I must need a 28 x 1½ wheel. He then says he'll check his stores to see if he has some spare second hand wheels of the right size, and call me in a few days to let me know.

So now I have a few different ways I have tried to get the right wheel. I have looked online, searching for "40-635 wheel". No good results. I searched for "635 wheel" – this got better results – some shops had it, all I think based in Europe (well they were priced in Euros), but generally sold out and with unknown shipping costs. A lead if this doesn't pan out. I also searched for "700b", based on a forum thread that said that that might be an equivalent. That search autocorrected to "700c" and returned useless results. I tried to search for "28 1 1/2 wheel", but Google didn't really parse the fraction in a useful way. For the purposes of this blog post, I tried Amazon directly, to no joy at all. I have tried to buy from a local shop, and they didn't have the right thing in stock. I have tried again at the local shop, and tapped into a possible source of a new wheel which is not visible to technological systems at all. A "dark pool" of bike parts, if I was being pretentious. And I have mentioned this whole situation to my flatmate, who works as a cycle courier, who made a note of the size and said he'd have an ask around.

And this feels kind of emblematic of the way difficult tasks get solved these days. There are computer systems, and they can solve common tasks at scale. For more specific tasks, they handle ambiguity badly, and they take patience and skill to extract the correct answers from. Filtering through listings, refining search terms, picking up on context clues to try to understand. The computer systems do contain good contextual knowledge, but in increasingly marginal spaces - and the motivation for creating this knowledge and making it public increasingly isn't worth the cost. And then there are the smaller scale human networks which you can tap into, if you can find them and be trusted by them, and those are inefficient but ultimately the most powerful ways of solving these problems.

So, I guess the way this wraps up is – in this postulated agentic AI future, do I think that an AI will be able to solve the problem of sourcing a replacement for the front wheel of my bicycle? No. I think that AI agents will make the task for searching for a rare and specific thing online harder and scammier. They will be optimised for the common case, and they will be ever more enmeshed in an influence arms race. I think that the most fruitful avenues for solving these problems are ones which are explicitly hostile to interacting with automated systems in this manner. I think that, to the extent that AI agents are able to access these systems, the systems will be ruined and useless for solving the problems they are currently equipped for solving. Right now I could call the bike shop and ask about a specific wheel size, and they would pick up and have a conversation. If the bike shop starts getting 50 calls a day from an almost human voice asking about random sizes of bicycle wheel, they will stop answering the phone. And if my flatmate starts getting those calls, he might give up on telephony all together.

(God – has thinking about AI too much made me an anarchist??)

[* also known as ETRTO standards. Bicycle wheel size labelling is a fantastic rabbithole]

Short one whose message is mainly in the title. Next week I will be in Berlin! I hope to see some of you there!

I am running a workshop on the Friday afternoon. It's called Let's All Make One Really Big Game (with Downpour). We're all going to make one really big game with Downpour! It's a drop in workshop, with no real limit on numbers - we should have crafting supplies available, and people are free to roam through the festival taking pictures to add to their games. The way it's gonna work is that I'm gonna make a kind of "spine" game in advance, something where you're navigating through the festival space. And then other people who come to the workshop will make their own games, and then I'll link from my spine game directly into their games. And they will hopefully also link back to the spine game from their games, or into another game, or into various places online or elsewhere. We should end up with this kind of surreal shifting viewpoint as you navigate through these games and through the festival space. I think it'll be fun! I don't really know what the outcome will be.

But actually looking for that link, I see that Nathalie Lawhead, who I was on a panel with last year, and who I feature in my recent talk on creative tools with tones of distinct envy and admiration... is also running a collaborative let's all make one game together workshop! If Nathalie wasn't such a lovely person I would consider trying to hype this up into some kind of kayfabe rivalry between the two of us.

I will also be hosting a conversation on larp with Jana Romanova and Susan Ploetz. This hasn't been announced yet. So, shh, don't tell anyone I told you it was happening.

What else? Lots of people I've not seen in a long time, hopefully some sun, radlers on the grass & dancing at Panke into the night... I like AMAZE.

I should be bringing stuff to play Knife, Fork and Spoon - would love to test that on some volunteers at some point.

Oh, and I just got a delivery of stickers, so please do ask me for a Downpour sticker if you want one. These ones are kiss cut. Which means I have remembered to put some identifying details as to what they're about when I hand them to a confused person - there's a URL! a short pitch for what the thing is! I don't have to scrawl this stuff on the back! But also the sticker is just as incomprehensible as ever, once stuck. I love my little crying umbrella man logo.

Anyway - if you'll be there, come say hi! If you won't be but would want to say hi if you were - well, feel free to get in touch and we can do a video catch up some time.

this is a quick recommendation post for Despelote. it's a videogame, it lasts about 2 hours, it is, in my opinion, worth playing!

it's a personal documentary game about the creator, Julián Cordero, when he was a kid in Ecuador, and the period where Ecuador were in the qualifiers for the World Cup for the first time.

okay, now i'm gonna talk about some stuff that's best experienced for yourself, so... go play it, stop reading this.

there's some incredible transitions in this game. i think the strongest part of the game is the transitions, in fact? not to do down the experience of being a kid, kicking a ball with friends, overhearing conversations in the park, just generally having slack time and trying to find good ways of wasting it. that stuff is super strong, too. but the transitions!!

so, the game starts with a game. it's a simple top down football game, it works like Fifa or something. your consciousness passes between players as you pass and shoot and run up and down the pitch. you're a little pale dot against little dark dots. you learn the controls, here's how to move, here's how to kick the ball by flicking the stick, draw back before for extra power. shoulder trigger to run. okay, got it. and then you start to hear a conversation. it's in Spanish, and there are subtitles, so your eyes keep getting drawn from the football match to the subtitles on each side. the screen starts drawing away from you as you're focusing on it, also trying to read the subtitles... it starts getting harder and harder to play as the distractions increase and the screen gets smaller. slowly the scene around the TV fades in, it's your parents talking about how you're always on that game. but that, actually, right now, Ecuador are playing, and you'd probably want to watch that. it's almost impossible to play now, but you're still trying, and then they come and stand in front and turn it off. the outrage!! but then they turn it over to Ecuador playing - it's real footage, but in the in-game style, and you find pretty immediately that you're captivated by this. and clearly the boy you're playing finds this too, because pretty soon the TV screen is zooming in, the rest of the room starts to fade out.

what a bravura opening!! the way it layers the player & the character, establishing sympathy between them but also exploiting the way that their interests differ (for the typical player, of course you're fascinated by the parent's conversation - for the kid, of course your parents chatting is not nearly so interesting). that interplay between being the dot-footballer, and the boy sitting on the sofa playing. the way it shifts perspective seamlessly (only to hard cut at the end of this sequence). it's in control of what it's doing, and it's happy to do things that are difficult and expensive in order to achieve the artistic goals it's aiming for.

and that's not even the transition in the game that i'm left most thinking about.

Quick followup from yesterday's post, after a playtest:

Hey it works!

I mean, not entirely, the endgame was broken, but god knows I was not thinking as far ahead as the endgame before.

Let me quickly describe the game:

• ended up being 8 people playing
• on a big table, big enough not everyone could reach the cards or see other people's chips easily
• card counting wasn't even counting, people placed the cards out so we could all easily see what had come out
• which was good, felt nice to have an extra thing to chew on, knowing that the odds of any particular card being drawn varied continuously
• the fork & spoon card got played late in all the first few rounds
• a new rule, hastily adopted: on a reshuffle, increase the stake by one. this raised the tempo, especially as some people got out and then the others got richer
• and then it didn't raise it enough, so we went to: on a reshuffle, double the stake. this felt scary. but good scary.
• people were playing fast. i sometimes challenged people on where they'd placed their pieces versus what they'd said, and then got criticised by others for doing so. maybe that's just the natural rhythm of it? i'd like it to be a slower/more tense, though (like Skull & Roses can be)
• i guess unlike S&R, the table didn't focus on a single player's bluff either succeeding or failing. instead there was a reveal & the outcome was either lots of chips but not many. but you didn't really notice where they were coming from.
• there were unclear rules around what happens when you run out of chips, but still have some in your Knife, Fork, Spoon places. we had it that you could stay in til those were gone, but that broke the endgame.
• the endgame was: two players left in, and one was always spreading their chips between all 3 spaces. grinding inconclusive ending, we broke off rather than see it through.

Lots of suggestions of things to change, but what I'm gonna do for next time is:

• make up sheets to go in front of players that look like placemats. Unplayed chips go on the plate, and then get distributed out onto the Knife (left), Fork (right) and Spoon (top) places
• make up a doubling die to show the current state of the raise (and it does double each time)
• buy a load of dried beans to use as counters. maybe these do want to be chips long term to make it easier to manipulate higher stakes, but beans are funnier & cheaper
• instead of reshuffling & raising every time the Fork & Spoon card is drawn, do it whenever the last card of any type is drawn. This should smooth some of the variance in gaps between raises, and means you never know that one card is impossible to place
• possibly this also wants a mat showing the distribution of various cards
• "last gasp": if you're out of beans on your plate, remove all but one bean from your cutlery. these beans leave the game! i'm hopeful this will fix the endgame:
  • fewer beans in the endgame, and a mechanism for them to reduce further in a 1 v 1 showdown.
  • but also removing beans from the game in a way that feel exciting rather than boring or punishing
  • harder to stay in, if you run low of beans and have a few players in
  • but if you make it to the final two, you still have a chance to snatch victory. but it's much less likely. sure, you can safely draw back your bean on your turn - but you can only really get back in the game if you bluff out your opponent.
  • i mean, maybe it won't, or won't be enough.
  • also with this rule, if you have not enough beans, you go all-in and put those in. but maybe if it needs to be dialled up, not being able to meet the stake reduces you to a single bean, rather than being completely out.
• playtest with 4 players. more interested in how it plays for fewer than how it plays for 8, so i don't want to overcorrect at this stage

And things I'm not doing but could do in the future:

• adding cards in between rounds - possibly blind, from another deck
• obviously cards can have powers on them, if they want. like raise & reshuffle could be on different cards, as a obvious step. or...
• maybe this wants to be entirely rethemed
• could have a tuned escalation curve rather than doubling, if it needs finetuning
• maybe the number of beans you start with depends on the number of players playing?
• maybe players choose to raise the stake rather than it happening automatically?
• Ricky wants to throw teaspoons around
• and Alan wants sporks

Anyway, very pleased to have a working game on my hands. And one about which people have been saying things like "it's fun" and "I'd play that again".

so at the start of the month, I posted a game design without having played it at all. i was happy with this state of affairs, and had no burning desire to make sure it "worked" or was "playable". and then to my surprise i found myself wanting to try it out. so here's some sketchy notes on how it has evolved (note this post might not make sense unless you go back and look at the previous one):

played at Now Play This, as written

it works! as in, it functions, one can play it end to end. it does drag on, though, getting through an entire deck of cards feels like too much. in the original design, i was mitigating against this by suggesting that you could play it in among other activities, do some social upping of the stakes mid-way. this didn't seem to happen, though.

after one game against Arlo that was more or less tied, i was worried that it was essentially random (not that there's anything wrong with that!). but then i played against Seb (me lying, him deciding) and got way in the lead, so i'm less worried about that now.

played at Now Play This, sudden death

so to make games shorter and add some more tension into it, we decided it would be better to play where getting three right in a row (either deceiving or deciding) won you the game. getting one happens all the time, getting two in a row is normal... and then suddenly the game is at stake! exciting.

it seems to work, but there's some essential messiness about where the cards go. how do you keep track? there's some essential confusion going on, the idea of looking at a card and having to look up what you say (this is at least symmetric across lies and truth - but it's a headfuck to internalise), the idea of points coming not from lies successfully carried but from the decider being wrong (so: them accusing you of a lie when you were telling the truth counts just as much). and then to add to that, you now have four piles in front of you, and you have to remember to shuffle cards across when your opponent takes the card? something about the asymmetry leading straight into symmetry.

played at boardgames at mine last night, corrupted by gambling

we played the sudden death a bit and people liked it okay. and then i got the idea to make it even more complicated and add gambling.

ten chips each.
one chip in each round, as table stakes.
after the liar has announced, and the decider has also announced, either player can then raise (but probably actually only the liar will?). and only to the level of chips the other player can match, obv
if you fold your forfeit your chips to the other player
if it's revealed, the decider takes the chips if they got it right, otherwise the liar does.

if you get three in a row right as the decider, then you become the liar.

which also works, except for us working out the rules as we go and it being a bit complicated.

the moment i wanted was the moment where the liar states something, the decider makes a guess and the liar says "are you sure about that?" in an infuriating way. that's something i was scratching after in the original design, but i didn't really reach it - the game got too mechanical for it. but last night, with the gambling, it happened a few times. a little, maybe, still not there and probably it won't ever be. but fun to scratch away on.

things it still doesn't do i'd like it to / future work

i want it to adapt to more than 2 players. there's no doubt something here, but tricky because only one player can take the card. a binary choice... i have a design for this, i'll put it below.

i want it to be less of a headfuck. maybe the answer is just to play it with something other than playing cards. put the complexity of the lookup table into the cards rather than on the table. yes, i think i'll try that.

also we had jokers in, and the idea of jokers as a card where you can make a free choice as to whether to lie or not - that's appealing. i mean, a lot of the point of the game is to see whether detecting lies can be enough to hold up a game, even if the player lying has no choice about whether to lie. just the pure tell. but it's always fun when a small part of the game cuts against the main thrust. adds texture. anyway, custom cards allow more play in that space.

a more than 2 player variant

take turns as the liar, single turn, clockwise around the table. (maybe single turns at a time means it's harder to pick up on tells? but balance reasons suggest you want to rotate continuously)
everyone has to pay table stakes - before the lie is said. can also opt out of a round (does this break things?)
everyone submits their guess (is there some marker for this? thumbs up/thumbs down? maybe a bit of a hand strain. maybe there's something about where the chips are placed. with custom cards...)
liar can then raise
can stay in or not, change your guess or not.
if it's revealed & multiple people got it right, the money goes into a central pot, and only people who were in that round play for the next mini round. til only one person got it right, who gets all the contents of the pot.

sure, that seems like it might be more exciting. and seems like it's not broken, too.

god i love designing games. even if they're not going to go anywhere... glad i chose the job i did.