iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Ryan Cordell @ryancordell.org · 28/09/2026

Thanks to y’all’s help & some more research, my list of video games that include printing presses is growing I think I’ve found a student who wants to work on this project with me, so any other suggestions—particularly from the 80s & 90s—would be most welcome I can’t find an existing list anywhere

Sid Meier's Colonization (1994)
* Anno 1404 (2009)
* Deus Ex Human Revolution (2011)
* Dishonored (2012)
* Assassin’s Creed 3 (2012)
* Anno Online (2013)
* Bioshock Infinite (2013)
* Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015)
* Fallout 4 (2015)
* Civilization 6 (2016)
* Graveyard Keeper (2018)
* Anno 1800, Empire of Skies DLC (game 2019, DLC 2022)
* Hitman 3 (2021)
* Pentiment (2022)
* Baldur’s Gate 3 (2023)
* Esoteric Ebb (2026)
* The Sinking City 2 (forthcoming)
* Stop the Press! (forthcoming)

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Cyriak @cyriak.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Been messing around with Doom Builder

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

what about a playstation controller with a little slot to insert your credit card but it gobbles up your card, shreds it, and emits a "yummy yummy" noise while the haptics "digest" the pieces. cowards. make it.

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TAHK0 @tahk0.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

you can’t even write jokes better than this

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Marc Max @marcrobledo.com · 25/09/2026

A must read on how AI is specifically making a significative decrease of quality in ROM hacking and homebrew.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

It's the age of the constrained engine, baby

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Anna 🌿👁️ @annacwebs.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I love being in my early 30s, now I say stuff like “I’ve really been into yogurt sauces lately”

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

From a dinner a few weeks ago, I present to you some Mystery Donuts. Can you guess what they contain? Hint #1: That is a type of sugar on them.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

playing through it right now and it's really a game of mitigating just how much my scrappy kids get the shit kicked out of them every single time

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, DEREK IN HR IS A TAURUS SO YOU *MUST* DIVERSIFY YOUR JOB MATCHUPS BEFORE YOU GO IN FOR YOUR QUARTERLY REVIEW. i recommend equipping your dragoon with jump.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

i would also pay a lot more attention to my own horoscope if it was in all caps warning me about DANGEROUS ZODIAC PRIORITY MATCHUPS

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

man i never get sick of reading gamefaqs threads as i play through older games

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

they should bring back the rumble pack and sell it in different flavors. kitten purring. smoothie blender. car that lost power steering. Jackhammer.

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Thew @amazingthew.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

god i love videogames. have you heard about "places"? they are called locations

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Charles Snart (Histocrat) @thehistocrat.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Today I found out that pretty much all the original footage from the live action filming sessions for both Myst and Riven are viewable online over on the Video Game History Foundation Library in their original quality and I think thats pretty damn neat.

archive.gamehistory.org

Raw camera footage

View Raw camera footage in the Video Game History Foundation Library – Digital Archive.

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WOR$T GIRL IN ACADEMIA @medievaliste.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Once again, the median pay for an adjunct professor in the United States of America is $3,500 per course. Not per month, per course.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

if you're lucky enough to have an old 3DS lying around it is truly a marvelous thing to jailbreak it.

A Nintendo 3DS playing Final Fantasy Tactics (PS1)

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doruk balcı @dorukb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

new post to store my eavesdrop poems fuzul.bearblog.dev/eavesdrop-po...

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I have played hours of Urbanitas and I cannot stop thinking about it, I wake up with new strategies, it's so refreshing to have a sim builder system that seems to reinforce taking it slow and gentle in a tactile way. Long Live Neo Wichita (and my childhood dream of a Kansan city with a ferry)

a screenshot of a city built in Urbanitas named Neo Wichita. There's far more water here than a typical city in Kansas.

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bossk baby @bonnnt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

It is so mentally corrosive to try to ascertain, every day, whether the images I am seeing or the texts I am getting or the phone calls I am receiving are real - produced by a human who is trying to communicate something with me, even indirectly. It makes me feel insane and paranoid all the time

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Leland, my stalwart friend, has mastered the art of charismatic ennui

A handsome cat posting with affected ennui

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Rebekah Valentine @duckvalentine.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

if you can't be bothered to make your own game i can't really be bothered to play it

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

something that continually touches me - every month or two, someone stumbles across CentoQuest and gently leaves the poem they created in the game's comments. and then I get to wake up to an email that another little lovely poem has been created in the system! bibliomancer.itch.io/centoquest

bibliomancer.itch.io

CentoQuest by bibliomancer

Explore a home. Write a poem.

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Jenna "the" Yow @jannouna.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

Extremely heartbroken to say that I'm one of the affected members. Working at KO_OP for four and a half years has been one of the best things to ever happen to me and I really hope that my teammates can land a pitch that can bring us all back together again.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Zelda visuals should always be a bit uncanny and unsettling, and it's the one thing I missed about BOTW/TOTK. welcome back creepy mournful doll-like details from majoras mask/twilight princess. for a game so clearly about nostalgia, OoT *should* make us queasy like we ate too much overripe fruit. A+

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Jesper Juul @jesperjuul.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

From the Handmade Pixels interview series, here is my conversation with Zach Gage @stfj.net. Thanks! jesperjuul.net/handmadepixe...

jesperjuul.net

Handmade Pixels: Interview with Zach Gage

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

i mean it is also true that a provocation and a 24-hour game jam is great pressure to make something bibliomancer.itch.io/poems-arent-...

bibliomancer.itch.io

Poems aren't stories. by bibliomancer

(A response.)

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

this a very engrossing play-along thread to follow

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aproxm @handle.invalid · 07/09/2026

capcom and nintendo sure seem to be ruling the roost. i wonder why... whats that? their labor laws forbid them from killing everyone on the studio floor after a game ships? they have wealths of institutional knowledge as a result? curious.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I love videogame poems, the Game Poems book is what got me started making games in earnest, and game jams are some of the most important and earnest contemporary art-making spaces happening. All of that true, today's NFTS game jam describes the entire form of poetry in a strangely limiting way:

Screenshot text from game jam page: For the first time ever, the National Film & Television School (NFTS) is hosting a public Game Jam!

Join us in celebrating Videogame Poems as an emergent short-form personal expression that challenges traditional boundaries between art forms!

Storytelling is what we do at the NFTS and games have unique narrative qualities that put players at the heart of the experience, driving the story.

Poems are stories that break conventions, celebrate form, the epic and heroic, but also the most personal and intimate experiences. We are keen to see what game developers can do with this emergent and exciting game genre in just 24 hours!

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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 07/09/2026

every time one of these dudes posts a screenshot showing how impressive AI output is it looks like the thing if you're an idiot who just consumes empty signifiers but if you actually have eyes it looks like shit... why is the pixel art distorted and messed up? why is the text in gpt voice?

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

!!!!!! i DID miss it! this looks glorious.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

making things efficiently does not mean effectively. it certainly doesn't inherently make art interesting to others. generating slop will give you momentary pleasure, and then it's gone, and you'll need more of that feeling. the vacuous hole of the prompt window would love to give you another fix.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

deus ex mankind divided was the perfect game for me until I hit the 95% point. Then it was essentially the "person in your fiction workshop writes an absolute banger but also it's finals week so they crammed 10 pages of ending into 1 page of exposition." still 100% worth it but the end is laughable

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

hello new bluesky folks, it's a pleasure to meet you. i don't just post about my ugly roller coaster tycoon levels, i also make little videogames that are also poems/dioramas/strange little historic print culture collage works like this one: bibliomancer.itch.io/the-tiny-toy...

bibliomancer.itch.io

The Tiny Toy Theatre Imagination Kit by bibliomancer

Make your own nineteenth century toy theatre diorama!

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Daniel J. Menezes @danjohnston.uk · 05/09/2026

Creating this no-ai indie games starter pack is one of the best things I ever did on BlueSky. Lots of great developers in here, making things with their own hands, some of whom I might not have found otherwise!! go.bsky.app/78u8M6Y

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☀️ @stel.energy · 01/09/2026

dont buy games that fire their teams on launch

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

it is 2028. there is one man in a room of 200 computers who makes our videogames. he possess the rights to every IP throughout time. he leans forward and whispers into a microphone at the center of the room. "aero the acro-bat in fortnite." he is fired halfway through resultant battle pass.

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duxerz @duxerz.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Save System, also showcasing how files are saved #indiegame #pixelart

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

after teaching games courses earlier this summer, I'm also thinking about how to bring LOVE ETERNAL into a classroom. feels like a productive impossibility -- I couldn't count on students to reliably beat these levels on a standard course timeline, but there's v. interesting design to discuss here

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Ashley @ashleysays.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Chefs kiss

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jason grinblat @jfg.land · 28/08/2026

this is one of the most deranged (positive) fan works I've seen. please watch this video

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I just came out of my first fugue state of playing Love Eternal (@brlka.com) of what I assume will be many more - there's something very special about momentum/hesitation here. Instead of tight mastery it feels more like I'm surrendering to a brutal force of momentum with each leap.

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

want to be fun and normal at the bar. cannot stop thinking about the trade offs of bundling my go karts in race formation versus a continuous flow of traffic. rc tycoon classic you monster

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brendan mordheim @brendanmcleod.dev · 23/08/2026

we used to make Video Games

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

dirty limousine at the far end of the Walmart parking lot

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Brendan Allen @brendanallen.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

on a "real" train, going to go do some "work," literally cannot stop thinking about how to get more riders on a log flume that dives into the pit of the earth

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