Lonelog

Notation as a Tool of Thought

4-Layers, A Narrative Design Approach

Introduction This blog post will be about a new way to approach narrative design in games - the 4 Layers Approach. It is based on a GDC ...

Weaving Narratives into Procedural Worlds

Examining the value, characteristics, and methods of integrating static narratives into otherwise procedurally generated environments.

The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer – Holy Ghost Stories

In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.

Building games that can be understood at a glance

Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018

Building games that can be understood at a glance

Building games that can be understood at a glance - Zach Gage, GDC 2018

How to write better (game) libraries

Introduction The aim of this article is to provide a series of good general advice and consideratio…

Game Dev by @trezy.codes

Posts about all aspects of game development. Opt in with "game", followed by animation, art, audio, design, dev, jam, lighting, music, narrative, or writing. Opt out with #Private, #NoFeed, or #NoGameDev. Discuss at trezy.studio/discord. Support the feed at ko-fi.com/trezycodes.

Game Dev by @trezy.codes

Posts about all aspects of game development. Opt in with "game", followed by animation, art, audio, design, dev, jam, lighting, music, narrative, or writing. Opt out with #Private, #NoFeed, or #NoGameDev. Discuss at trezy.studio/discord. Support the feed at ko-fi.com/trezycodes.

"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.

Critical Distance

"Where is all the good writing about games?"

If You’ve Only Ever Played D&D, You’re Missing Out - Aaron Ross Powell

Tabletop RPGs are story engines. Why would you want to tell only one kind of story?