Building games that can be understood at a glance

Designing Games to Learn

As I've been writing this series of newsletters on learning and video games, there's been a spectre lurking in the background. Video games and education. Edutainment.

The Pentaract

The AppView for the games.gamesgamesgamesgames.* ATProto lexicons

Critical Distance

"Where is all the good writing about games?"

“The Door Problem”

Game design is one of those nebulous terms to people outside the game industry that’s about as clear as the “astrophysicist” job title is to me. It’s also my job, so I find myself explaining what game design means to a lot of people from different backgrounds, some of whom don’t know anything about games.

"What's my model inside of?": Exploring the role of environments for grounded natural language understanding

In contrast to classical cognitive science which studied brains in isolation, ecological approaches focused on the role of the body and environment in shaping cognition. Similarly, in this thesis we adopt an ecological approach to grounded natural language understanding (NLU) research. Grounded language understanding studies language understanding systems situated in the context of events, actions and precepts in naturalistic/simulated virtual environments. Where classic research tends to focus on designing new models and optimization methods while treating environments as given, we explore the potential of environment design for improving data collection and model development. We developed novel training and annotation approaches for procedural text understanding based on text-based game environments. We also drew upon embodied cognitive linguistics literature to propose a roadmap for grounded NLP research, and to inform the development of a new benchmark for measuring the progress of large language models on challenging commonsense reasoning tasks. We leveraged the richer supervision provided by text-based game environments to develop Breakpoint Transformers, a novel approach to modeling intermediate semantic information in long narrative or procedural texts. Finally, we integrated theories on the role of environments in collective human intelligence to propose a design for AI-augmented "social thinking environments" for knowledge workers like scientists.

ATmosphere Games - (definitions for eligibility and interop)

As the number of games using rpg.actor increased, we realized a need for something that could declare what records a game requires, and how they could be verified. We wanted to build an Experiences Portal that could showcase games using the .sprite or .stats lexicons, and make clear how other games required or used the interoperable records from different games and projects. For example, how Clun’s Cannon uses the Jet Pack item from protoimsg.app, or how chaos.soccer verifies the Clown Shoes ...

Game design is simple, actually

So, let’s just walk through the whole thing, end to end. Here’s a twelve-step program for understanding game design. One: Fun There are a lot of things people call “fun.” But most of them are not u…

Learning to solve complex tasks by growing knowledge culturally across generations

Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what previous generations believed, valued, and practiced, and how these evolved over time. The power and mechanisms of language as a means of cultural learning, however, are not well understood, and as a result, current AI systems do not leverage language as a means for cultural knowledge transmission. Here, we take a first step towards reverse-engineering cultural learning through language. We developed a suite of complex tasks in the form of minimalist-style video games, which we deployed in an iterated learning paradigm. Human participants were limited to only two attempts (two lives) to beat each game and were allowed to write a message to a future participant who read the message before playing. Knowledge accumulated gradually across generations, allowing later generations to advance further in the games and perform more efficient actions. Multigenerational learning followed a strikingly similar trajectory to individuals learning alone with an unlimited number of lives. Successive generations of learners were able to succeed by expressing distinct types of knowledge in natural language: the dynamics of the environment, valuable goals, dangerous risks, and strategies for success. The video game paradigm we pioneer here is thus a rich test bed for developing AI systems capable of acquiring and transmitting cultural knowledge.

gamesgamesgamesgamesgames/lexicon

An open data standard for describing video games and their data on ATProto.

The Game Dev Tree (Video Game) - TV Tropes

The Game Dev Tree is an Idle Game made in The Modding Tree by The Paper Pilot and released in 2020. In it, you are making your own game, releasing updates …

A lexicon for game activity sharing

I think that discussion landed on atmosphere.games, no? I think it’d be cool to get this lexicon out there soon.

NewCrafts Paris 2025

NewCrafts Paris, an ephemeral learning ground for professional developers who care for quality code and bettering their practices.