looking for a world

As I wrote last month, I had less time to spend on here and then gone, so instead of something digital, I made a tiny postcard game.

I don't know where it came from, but I had this phrase "I am looking for a world" stuck in my head, so I spun a game out of it. I guess it's a kind of solo journalling game, designed to fit on a postcard. An attempt at writing a gamepoem, or game design as poetry.

Download looking for a world

The Rules:

• The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (7/10/23).
• This download is a zipfile containing a PDF.
• All documents and assets are included, licensed under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License.
• As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.

Further Reading

Coercion versus Care: on the human impacts of corporations' resourcing decisions, and how so much more time and money is spent on coercion than care.

Adding Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine to my to-read list.

The story of how Austrian supermarkets' price fixing was revealed by scraping the prices on their websites.

A fascinating twitter (sorry!) thread documenting Brian Bucklew's (successful) attempts to port the core of Caves of Qud from Unity to Godot.

A neat NY Times article on how Singapore is attempting to cool the city down with careful planning and tree planting.

A fascinating retrospective on the design of the Spoils card game in the upcoming Saltsea Chronicles.

I liked this piece by Jenny Odell on collage and the artist Jess.

Young Fathers are still making the best music to ever come out of Scotland.

An English translation of the new Cuban Families Code, a rare example of a government putting care above coercion in how they treat their citizens' living situations.

I don't know if I could actually stand to play it myself, but this substack post by Kastel on Void Stranger makes it sound absolutely fascinating.

A long read by Owen Hatherley on Transformers, memory, and growing up in a culture so thoroughly commercialised and ruthlessly marketed.

"As much as I might root it in a love of my hometown’s heroic Brutalist social architecture, I know that the excitement I feel looking at, say, the 1960s architecture of Kenzo Tange, is rooted in the excitement I felt as a six-year-old boy looking at the animated Autobot City. All of us – except perhaps a handful of people with exceptionally pushy and vigilant middle class parents - are like this, and our dreams are not entirely our own. Perhaps in that dream of transformation, and of commodities that can think for themselves, there is something that can be redeemed."

It feels closely linked to this Everest Pipkin piece on Roblox and inhabiting the spaces created then abandoned by capitalism.

I have overcommitted myself at work this term, and it looks like it's going to be a scramble to get everything done that I have agreed to do, so apologies if the next few here and then gones are a bit minimal. I hope you're doing okay out there, and are managing to avoid making the kind of mistakes I've been making 🙃