Tales from the Feed, 2026-5

January 2026
February 2026
March 2026
April 2026

A few days late on this one since I was out of town at the end of the month.

People allegedly liked my Cohost compilation posts at the time and I think it's good to share sometimes. Though since this isn't Cohost anymore, I'm slow at looking at my RSS feed (these ain't even all from my RSS feed), and I hate looking at bsky, there's probably just going to be way fewer/smaller posts on these. Oh well.

Please comment with anything else you think was good, I am going to naturally miss a ton of stuff that simply doesn't reach me

The reason your mee-maw and your bank and your boss can all reach you at the same email address is that the protocol that made it possible was published more than forty years ago, and the people who published it did not successfully capture it inside of one company.

The base of the creature is the Godzilla suit that was used in Godzilla VS Mothra (1964). Early designs for Gomess went from a quadruped to biped and eventually Toho agreed to lend the Ultra Q team an older Godzilla suit, with Toho artists working to make the modifications in a way that could be useful to Tsuburaya but reversible for future Godzilla use (which may or may not have panned out, but more on that later).

Marc Andreessen Egg Game has two modes: Creative Mode (draw one outstanding egg with unlimited time) and Speedrun Mode (draw three eggs quickly).
Figuring out how to "grade" speedrun mode was a challenge. Comparing your drawing to the raw pixels in an image of Marc seemed hard and arbitrary. But having no rules at all about what I considered a "completed" Marc seemed like a mistake.

Narrative games are real games

Games are games even if there's no lose condition or win condition. Games are games even if they don't test your skill. Games are games even if they don't let you change the outcomes.
It's okay if you don't like those types of games, I'm often not in the mood for them myself. But I don't think a lack of interactivity makes something definitively "not a game."

When nostalgia was invented, it was something that happened to us.
In the late 17th century Johannes Hofer created the term in order to describe an intense melancholia that gripped soldiers who yearned to be home rather than engaging in warfare. People were gripped by nostalgia, driven into ambient madness by it, made victim by a wholly new regime of feeling that could only be labeled by creating a term that bridged pain and home. In its origin, to be nostalgic is to be gripped by something you cannot let go.

It is a flat idea of a farmer, labour drawn in pixels because it is a video game before it is anything, and it feels far removed from my mom telling me stories about the farm she was raised on. It's never supposed to be real, but it simulates reality all the same. It is not that I don't appreciate the game making space for labour, it's that the work has been co-opted and turned into something it will never be. It is a cozy game where the goal is to work exhaustive hours, and I wonder if anyone who makes hushed-tone videos draped in clouds of pastel colours ever asks themselves how hard it would be to work the fields of the land given to them. I wonder if they have ever washed their hands once, and then twice, to get the grim and oil off them so that they might not hold the sweat of the day in their pores when it's time to eat, or to lie on the floor and hope that its hard cold surface could realign the muscles in their back.

"No, I cannot message them directly, that is awkward, we have never interacted before!" ... so? Damn, the website/app offers DMs and now you can't even privately message strangers on the internet anymore? What has this place come to? Now you're just there to scroll and passively consume ads and no longer talk to the people that share the ads around voluntarily? DMing someone is "intimate"? You are "harassing" someone with a simple message they can choose to open or ignore? Do you hear yourself?

The biggest reason I keep reiterating that we need to write blogs, not posts is because the act of drafting prose hopefully forces the author to reckon with the very specific text of someone else's argument (a review, comment, or even a post) and not the quippy strawman of it they wrote that is so easy to dunk on in a post. Another reason is that we are desperate for a record to cite as we build on each other towards new conversations that develop into new ideas and ways of thinking about games (and, yes, new ways of thinking about games writing, too).

I think this unproductive cycle of discussions is another expression of the Deadzone that exists within industrial videogames. In the case of games criticism, it was created and is still maintained by the specific, broken media landscape we exist in, but it is also something that exists within us. I feel a lot of people who discuss videogames critically can't even imagine a different approach to it than what we have right now.

This is, I think, the most provocative question posed by Lessons in Love's themes: is it possible to move on without diminishing or exacerbating the harm? We may crave punitive punishment or become too readily forgiving, but they are only for our satisfaction. More importantly, the spectacle of accurately measuring the degree of harm and charting out the timeline on how the abuser should work their way toward forgiveness do not construct a safe world for survivors. It becomes more difficult if we try to trace the beginnings of the violence too: the cycles of abuse must have started from somewhere, but how do we search for its genesis when everyone has their own reasons to speak half-truths or cannot recollect why they're there?

Doodads attempt to solve the problem of complexity while keeping things analog. A question arises, then: if analog players want analog play aids, why do more games not come with them? And, a related question, why is a company like Fantasy Flight an object of fun on the basis that its games come with TOO MANY analog play aids? Lastly, why don't analog game companies just make less complex games?

Beyond just being artificial, I think the idea of "combat", and especially a dedicated combat system as such, often sucks up all the energy in the room if you let it. In this case I don't want to make a game that exists as a thin shell around a skirmish game or even a theoretical game that isn't that but it's extremely assumed you're doing combat so effectively it is; I want whatever we're doing here to be something that exists to serve the game as a whole.

There are a million things you can do to fine-tune the level of friction in a game: difficulty levels, hints and handicaps, hiding the path to their goals or revealing juicy secrets to those who care enough to poke their nose into dark corners. One thing you can't do is force someone to follow the intended path, nor can you stop them from pursuing (on purpose) the outcome you use to punish others. You can lead a gamer to water, but you can't make them win. Does lacking that friction necessarily lead to a game's death knell? Hardly.

Wishing You Could Change Artists

This would be a tangent into a whole other complicated subject, but it is not a secret that the age of social media has created a complicated dynamic when it comes to "people seeing content they don’t like." Words like "puriteens" and "wokescolds" emerge from thorny interactions on social media where people don’t necessarily know what to do with their frustrations and discomfort. They see things they don’t like, want creators to change or want the world to feel like a better place, and they start lashing out and using the tools at their disposal to try to take matters into their own hands.

First, and this is the obvious one, what is an author doing putting a citation into their essay if they haven't read it? This is a bit of an idealistic way to phrase it, but bear with me: if you have not read the work, you should not ever cite it in any way. Because citations are for things that you fucking read, and nothing else. That is actually practical. When you put a citation into a piece of research, you are explicitly claiming that you read it. And, while different fields may have different definitions of what it means to "read" an article (see above), it still expects one to have done the reading if one puts the citation in. This is so important that one of the things I learned early on in academic writing is to cite the exact edition I read. No other. Because if I use an old edition, cite the newer one, and the text I quoted was changed, by a typo or a revision, then I effectively fucked up my citation, because I am pinky swearing that I read the exact edition that is in my citations.

The reason I've been thinking about this, though, is because the actual impermanence of the digital world and the way people talked about it originally kind of reminds me of the way that my parents talked about sins (specifically, sins in the Catholic sense of the concept). That, combined with an interesting bit of information about how humanity responds to technology, has me drawing a parallel I didn't really expect.

When I wrote about it for the game, I'd imagined it just sitting there on the side of the road, naked and plain, so that you could just effortlessly walk up to it. Instead, it feels like walking through a curtain to take your place on a stage. The viewing platform where you can shout at the rock is raised, so approaching it feels ceremonial, almost.

Like every transgender woman, I have thought about the life I would have lead were I born as a cisgender woman. The body I would have, and all the things I could have had in life. It is easy to think of how life would be easier without the barriers we face. To see fertility and motherhood only as a path denied to us, but to miss the blessings of the paths we took instead.

video game criticism is not the wind or the tides. it is not a naturally occurring force we cannot control, guiding us with an invisible hand. you do not have to follow trends or the whims of the industry, especially if you run your own website.

I've lived with diabetes for 27 years and I've been on pumps for 25. I have spent a quarter of a century relying on machines to keep me alive. It has never failed on me before. It's incredible that I've been able to do this, and it's incredible that it never occurred to me to plan for a situation where the entire pump would fucking break. We can thank the FDA for that!

I can't quite tell where I am in my walk by how the asphalt feels beneath me, but I can tell how much further I have to go. I can tell how much longer I probably have before the soles wear out (three or four months). I can tell if my shoelaces need replacing (they did) and if the new ones are holding sufficiently (they aren't). I can tell it has been two weeks since I started doing full walks again because my lower back feels better, but the arches of my feet do not. I can tell it's still dry out, even if the air feels a little humid, because of a light hising noise one of my shoes makes if I step heavily on it since it bubbles silently instead if its even a little damp.

XD-submit Vol. 1, as it turns out, is a promotional disc for a Kansai-area bulletin board system (BBS) called XD FirstClass Network. As I started digging into it I assumed this would be sort of a basic information kit, a digital pamphlet or something, but it's something a lot more exotic: a functioning archive of the BBS with its original client software for Mac. This was supposed to be a demo so you could browse it offline and decide if you wanted to join, but here in 2026, when this BBS has been offline for three decades, it gives us a chance to actually see what it was like when it was alive.

Some folks will have thought I was attacking them or their skillset, out of insecurity or even just confusion of terms – there’s an issue of "level design" meaning different things to different people, or being seen as in direct competition with other disciplines (like env art) when that's only the case by avoidable pipeline misfortune. An Epic engineer or two were annoyed by the Quake 1 comparison, and I thought, why? That's the last time you did any serious work on these. Do you realise you haven't touched these tools in almost 20 years?

If they're enjoying the hobby, what does it matter if it's not in the same way you enjoy the hobby? If every time someone tries to talk to you about what they enjoy, and your response is to critique it, or make them feel bad about it, they're simply going to leave the hobby, or stop talking to you about it.

---
HTML Comment Box is loading comments...