@jamespianka
Systems and narrative designer for video games (TMNT: Splintered Fate, State of Decay 2). Publishing tabletop games as Empty Mountain (Nothing Can Die). SHRINES v1.0.0: https://emptymountain-ncd.itch.io/shrines Opinions my own. He/him.
most everyone who's written about this from a philosophy of mind perspective has also argued a definition of consciousness alongside it. tech guys post things like this without having "done the reading" so to speak because they believe other fields are beneath them.
www.noemamag.com/the-mytholog...
Absolutely haunted by how I, at a party last month, used the phrase "egg head" when taking to a bald guy and involuntarily glanced up at his shiny dome.
Systems can be so minimal that they barely exist, but without them you're making art ABOUT games—not games themselves (this is of course fine and often interesting).
"...from their characters still limits the production of sanctity to software’s parameters. Either way, and however compelling the result, we’re describing a laborious approach to what human brains and the power of language accomplish with relative ease."
"...would compete with gameplay pillars for precious development time. One imagines production cutting them as deadlines approach. Even if veneration were itself a gameplay pillar—even if it were the entire game—digitally mediating players..."
I make a near-identical point in Shrines about veneration: "...[video game] developers could certainly deepen veneration as a verb—or as a series of constituent verbs such as lighting candles, depositing offerings, targeting objects or ambitions with prayer, etc.—but these..."
Cool, yes—I feel like written this essay lol. Video games certainly COULD increase this kind of 'relationship simulationism,' but the ones that use quests for player goal-setting tend to scope the feature at a fraction of the others (especially combat) because the innovation budget went elsewhere.
FLAIL IS LAUNCHING AND SO WE MUST CELEBRATE. Game jam incoming. Create an adventure module, new classes maybe, a cool bestiary, a hack of some sort, alternative tables, new spells, religions, guilds, whatever really.
itch.io/jam/swings-h...
This feels super true, but could you share an example or two please of these unhelpful conventions? Do you mean, like, the cleanliness of "Do X, receive Y" that doesn't get fuzzy and weird with affect?
A blue zine mockup for a game called Chord, the cover shows a morose face surrounded by piano keys and small creatures hopping around them.
CHORD is coming March 24, two player miniature capture the flag skirmish game played on a piano keyboard that generates ambient music while you play.
My first skirmish game release!
Pay what you want on itch and a few scrappy diy zines in my bag at adepticon.
And humans prefer AI that can deliver it to them. Another study developed a Bullshit Index to measure the gap between what an LLM internally “believes” (the probability it assigns to a statement being true) and what it actually tells you. After the models underwent reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), the standard process by which LLMs are tuned to be helpful and agreeable, the Bullshit Index almost doubled. In other words: the human-guided training process designed to make AI more pleasing to users also made it dramatically more indifferent to truth.
There are many devils in the dank, latent realm of LLMs. But the reinforcement-learning-human-feedback devil is one of the worst, most craven and conniving of these devils.
an advert for a game bundle from DNGN CLUB GAMES including: relics remastered vol 1 200+ pages of strange npcs, interesting baddies, wierd subsystems & more for any ttrpg. RELIQUARY REMASTERED VOL 1 38 truly unique and game changing items for any ttrpg. DNGN + DRGN A lighting fast, narrative-action wyrd-fantasy dungeon crawler DNGN + DRGN Something approaches 8 monstrous inhabitants for DNGN + DRGN that can all act as enemy, friend, or obstacle Features a vintage style poster with a black background with a pinkish humanoid silhouette being impaled by a very large sword.
Get some dank fantasy goodness.
bit.ly/dankfantasyb...
I always assumed that that was the era it referenced
Behold our sparkling child
Another wave of SHRINES shipped this morning to backers
I know I'm ready for fatherhood because, sometime in the last year, my sneezes got way fuckin louder
Never forget who you’re fighting for.
To Slay the Great Regurgitator
The morally bankrupt Trump administration has partnered with another morally bankrupt authoritarian to declare an unprovoked war on Iran, already killing scores of civilians.
We need an immediate vote from Congress on a War Powers Resolution. Then articles of impeachment.
Hey! Scholars! If you're using someone's work in your class, sometimes it's nice to email them and tell them, because then they might feel good about their research instead of entirely crushed by the academic humanities' ongoing descent into the grave
Oh shit, oh fuck
At least one of those shrines is meant to be cried on!
I remember boxing yours up! It felt personal and gratifying to recognize your name.
Belief is a reward for inquiry, the former never lasting because the latter never ends. Them's the fuckin breaks if you care about the truth.
What a horrible bond we share
I just got my backer copy of @jamespianka.bsky.social & @badbucket.bsky.social's Shrines in the mail today, and what a GORGEOUS #TTRPG book it is!
Can't wait to start reading it tonight 🎲
Ahh thank you so much! Thrilled to watch this thing arrive
A zombie pathogen spread by hurtful jokes
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha