David McHugh

Next vibe-coding, I'll need to ask Claude to assess a Squishiness score for its softerware.
Great article, as usual - thanks!

This reminds me of Doctorow's Code is a Liability.

What's a good examples of a game mechanic that illustrates a key historical insight? What's a mechanic that distorts understanding?

Why Chess Will Destroy Your Mind That’s how it looked back in 1859, according to Scientific American.

Thanks, Jeremiah! My contribution is that there was at least some (quaint) moral panic over Chess, "a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time", from medium.com/message/why-...

What are mostly forgotten games that went "viral" in their era (I'm thinking there must've been some courtly fads if nothing else)?
What's the earliest known moral panic over a game?
What's a historical game that's been surprisingly influential on modern game design?
Thanks!

This was a great talk! Thanks, Bryan & Steve & Trent. The podcast and book look great; I'll be sure to share those with interested students & educators.

Same. In principle, I'm anti privacy risks of age-gating. In practice, I think a good version of that might be less damaging than kids on social media and chatbots. Ugh.
I'm hoping there could be some responsible end point (e.g., iPhone) age verification rather than every site tracking us.

My favorite conference returns July 9 & 10! Play Make Learn (playmakelearn.org) is perfect for educators of all kinds, librarians, and creatives. I'll be here for the games plus amazing makerspaces, the arts, and more.

CfP open thru 3/9. In Madison, WI.

Pancakes are a load bearing part of the food pyramid. To sneak nutrition into my children I add astonishing quantities of eggs, riced veggies, seeds, fruits, etc. All vanish within the pancake's tasty embrace. The quest continues for the perfect lembas, however.

Maybe in 2426 humanity will discover Brandon Sanderson was writing encoded essays rather than novels. Probably still about magical worldbuilding though.

I love that Trithemius literally wrote the book on this, fully hidden as a book on magic. And that it still took 4 centuries to figure out that book 3 was not an actual book about magic. Committed to the bit.

Thanks, Bonni! I'll check those out.

Being older school, I would probably have to check my calendar to see what I've done for fun in the distant past of more than 48 hours ago...

I'm sympathetic to the underlying concern, but the context of admissions means the question isn't really about fun but an evaluation of them. I'm much more sympathetic to automated help for an often less than human admissions system than if this is actually how they identify fun.

I recently discovered the podcast and it's excellent - thanks! I love the AI metaphor game; last year I ran an AI Metaphor Tournament with students but now the bar is set higher! I'm looking forward to perusing the podcast backlog.

Strong negative reactions to the app are actually strongly correlated with a severe diagnosis of [create an account to view]! New accounts get 10% coupon with Pharmatron brand [pro account needed].
; )

Hypochondriac's Friend - the app that confidently explains how every symptom is in fact cancer (inspired by WebMD). Paid accounts can upgrade to more exotic illnesses.

Why waste your time with books, when you can read whole genres this way? I thought the Love genre was solid. Magic was so good I even read the Dragons subgenre. Nonfiction's still pretty slow though, Old was ok, but Numbers put me to sleep.

Awesome. Some art is timeless. I really want to know what's going on with this guy and his noble steed...

A painting of a Mongol horseman attributed to Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322 CE). Made in China during the Yuan Dynasty (1260 - 1368 CE). Hanging scroll; colors on silk.

Sounds like the people call out for a "sequel" to Pentiment but in the style of cave paintings... And/or various art styles of horses through history (Mongols, ~1300 AD):

Unpopular opinion: I was really put off by what seemed to me to be a very strong pro-suicide theme of the Good Place's finale. Brilliant show, but it lost me at that one.

A hot take indeed. I'd argue Venn diagram instead. Just because Work is rarely set up to be playful doesn't mean they're opposite. Some of the best work (and colleagues!) are playful, and that's largely independent of the difficulty of the work.

This kinda came up in their most recent podcast:

That's an interesting example since ESRB a self-regulatory organization. I don't think it'd be constitutional for the government to demand that same level of access (nor would I trust all administrations with that power).

Relevant comic, from: www.kevincomics.com/comic/enhance/

Excellent visualizations and contextualization. Though I expect some of this won't land as people talk past each other: critiques are centered on generative AI but water savings are presumably not from genAI.

No mention of not murdering people? Suspicious.

The Dream Auditor Morris Kreplach had audited seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-two dreams, and not once—not once—had anyone dreamed of something genuinely interesting, unless you counted Mrs. Henderson from Topeka whose recurring nightmare about being chased through a grocery store by sentient produce had at least displayed some creativity in its selection of weaponized vegetables (the Brussels sprouts were particularly vindictive). But on this gray Tuesday morning in 2157, as Morris plugged his neural interface into the overnight batch from Sector 7, he encountered something that made his coffee cup slip from his trembling fingers and shatter against the linoleum floor of the Department of Subconscious Revenue like his sanity would moments later. The dreamer was listed as Subject 7749-B, a maintenance worker named Janet Kowalski who lived in a cramped efficiency above a noodle shop and whose tax file indicated she possessed all the mathematical sophistication of a particularly dim turnip. Yet her dream—her beautiful, impossible dream—contained equations that danced across Morris's screen like luminescent poetry: calculations that described the curvature of space-time as if it were putty in cosmic hands, formulas that mapped the precise location of every quantum particle that had ever existed or ever would exist, and most disturbing of all, a mathematical proof that reality itself was nothing more than an elaborate debugging session run by bored graduate students in a universe one dimension higher than ours. Morris stared at the scrolling numbers, his bureaucratic heart hammering against his ribs like a caged physicist trying to escape tenure review, because he realized with dawning horror that Janet Kowalski's dream wasn't just mathematically impossible—it was mathematically true

That was a human (presumably) winning entry in 2024.

Claude, following your sci-fi prompt but in this style:

The Bulwer-Lytton Contest is excellent for this.

"Sir Arthur Pendragon, High King of the Britons, son of King Uther Pendragon... in turn the son of a long list of people who weren’t kings and thus don’t matter, only slept with his sister once, but boy did it come back to bite him in the ass."

This is awesome. Thanks for sharing and thanks for writing your book! I shared both with my class today (Games & Information Society).