iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I remember being at GDC many years ago when Sid Meier admitted that the probabilities in the later Civilization games act the way people think they should act rather than actual probabilities. Me and my friends almost stormed the stage with pitchforks and torches.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

Was true 16 years ago. Is still true. Games are, categorically, better when the people who play them are allowed to change them. gamedesignadvance.com?p=2180

gamedesignadvance.com

Make More Tennis Balls – Game Design Advance

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If only they had followed through after Brood War and actually figured out how to do a fourth faction... Then Terran could get destroyed by yet another species!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

oh wow, that new Zelda game looks ugly. I guess they're just letting DLSS art directed entire remakes now?

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Which is, you know, not exactly the way that we taught them to think about how a game design practice should work when they were our students!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The NYU Game Center has some pretty accomplished alumni at this point and when they come to give lectures I often asked if they could talk about the games that influenced them in their design practice, and every person that works in corporate game dev has said they are forbidden from discussing that

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Speaking for myself, as someone that's had to read a lot of AI written papers, it's interesting how my tastes in writing have changed. At some point I need to sit down and actually articulate my 'logically-structured vs gestalt-sensitive' test for whether AI is ever going to be good at something.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

It's a good analogy! I think it's hard to predict because, while the barrier to entry is going to go down for game dev, we don't know what the reactions in taste are going to be for AI. Tastes tend to shift a lot in relation to technological change, right? And this is a big shift, everywhere!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

We need to return to the general social belief that wealth is incredibly corrosive to the soul. If for no other reason than that it seems to be demonstrably true.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

One of Hideo Kojima's real talents is that he would have exactly this idea but the stew would be dropped off by a drone that sings a little jingle which can alert enemies if they're in range. You then get a phone call from a nuclear scientist who warns you not to eat too much starch and dairy.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

There are a lot of medieval village sim games that I really love, going all the back to Banished, and I have always understood why they are designed the way they are, but it's very funny how in most of them your villagers almost always die of old age.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I have no idea how much video games are to blame for this (probably not much), but I continue to think a pernicious quality of games is not that they are violent but that they tend to simulate the past as involving far less random death than it actually did.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Hey, I'm all for a return to esports being the hottest trend in games

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

- Gamer Theory (2007) by McKenzie Wark

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Which you would need in order to test market reaction for anything beyond a niche, indie-oriented audience. In my opinion.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

So, I don't think there are technical limitations for narrative, but there are technical limitations around 'AAA' visual fidelity. The problem is not generating the plot, it's that we don't, as of yet, have ways to generate large, satisfying, and seamless environments at high visual fidelity.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

That either indicates that there isn't as much demand for that kind of experience as we might have expected, or that it was too small a release to tell you anything, and if you had a higher fidelity game it would really take off.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

There's only one real data point that I know of, which is a tactical RPG called Wildermyth, which procedurally generated campaigns and characters backstories and interactions, etc. It's well liked and was moderately successful but it's been 5 years and there aren't that many copycats.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Haha, there's an old quote from an interactive narrative scholar that goes something like: "We're all trying to make computers tell great stories, but the second we succeed the implications of that success will mean that telling stories is the least interesting thing computers can do."

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

By procedural narrative do you mean the plot is generated, or do you just mean that the dialogue is generated? Also, not sure that open-world makes a difference here. Most open world games are repeated templates, so anything you can do for a single quest giver you can do for every quest giver, etc.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

Be careful! Folks have almost got a good chunk of the next generation reset to just enjoying chill games with no real challenge or competition. Don't spoil it for everyone.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

Sometimes, if we're smart and lucky and work hard, we end up saying something that almost no one can truly disagree with in their hearts. It's like the old quote about haiku masters striving to write just ten poems their entire lives.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

This is a good joke but I genuinely once suggested to a student that you could think of pianos as a type of creature that had evolved to sound pretty so that humans would keep reproducing them.

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Reposted by charlesjpratt

Boo!-per Lund @cooperlund.online · 11/08/2026

Ah, I see that people are discovering the DSA paradox: Local chapters can be very competent challengers to the Democratic Party but the national org has been largely captured by kooks, encouraging the independence of local chapters.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Reminds me a lot of Anna Meredith's stuff, especially the earlier albums! Wonder if she ever played the games

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

This idea is great but it's why I increasingly think that actually succeeding in capturing the House and Senate is a moment of maximum danger for Democrats. If they have power and don't use it for things like your suggestion, or repealing the filibuster, then I'm worried the party might collapse.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I would be the greatest poker player in the world if the other players would stop hiding their cards from me.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

There's probably something else there about getting incredibly famous and becoming a household name off of pretty low effort work, but I don't know enough about the history of either...

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Current experience has made me start to think that Blippi is the Jordan Peterson of children's media. No matter how many times you tell YouTube you're *not interested* the algorithm refuses to believe you (and your child) and will keep putting it in your feed just in case you've changed your mind.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

This seems like a mode that some sciences have been working in for a long time, but might be a big cultural shift for mathematics!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Your last point is actually something that is becoming more of a part of my feedback as I encounter more AI essays. I lean more on my students to be clear about why -they- are writing about a topic.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Oh, yeah, I didn't meant to imply it was the biggest problem in the world! Just that it's a quirky thing that I didn't encounter 10 years ago. At least it's an indication that AI didn't write their paper!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

This also might mean smaller cultural industries. I have a spiritual agreement with the folks that think video games should embrace a more 'indie' mindset, but it is always worth remembering that it would mean employing even fewer devs than we do currently.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Like, look back at TV in the 90s. It was of much lower quality! But also very cheap, and so you get 22 episode season rather than 8. Does that mean that all that old TV is bad? No, it's quite charming and sometimes profound. But what it always was was inexpensive!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

Then the question is: can we climb down and start making things more cheaply again, and can audiences learn to value other kinds of signals than the 'polish' that came with a generation long economic environment that might now be coming back?

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

It's probably a lot of idiotic and greedy management, but there is also a possibility that we got used to a level of quality in our entertainment products that is simply not sustainable in a more constrained financial environment.

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Reposted by charlesjpratt

Bruno Dies @brunodias.dev · 21/07/2026

The main way in which AI has negatively impacted games industry jobs is not through actual automation of those jobs or even untrue claims about automation. It's by making capital unavailable because it's tied up in AI investments while also destroying the consumer base for video game hardware.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

What is interesting is that this leaks down to younger writers through imitation. So many of the student essays I read now have whole sections devoted to just saying it's all their opinion etc etc, because that's what the YouTubers they watch do to avoid pile ons

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

That game is definitely not a product of millennial culture. Don't let Julian's beard fool you.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

Haha, well, I'd like to think I don't either! But it increasingly seems like we don't have much control over the 'us' we're included in.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I remember having an interesting conversation with my wife where I posited that if Americans could actually 100% enforce their laws they would recoil from it. Part of us actually thinks it's important that sometimes people, people like us, should be able to get away with things!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

I increasingly believe Mom energy is the best case scenario for a lot of us as we get older. We should embrace it!

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

With generative AI, my guess is that if you had open source, low power models, which might be coming (we'll see) it would quickly be revealed that the heart of the critique is actually around the morality of training itself.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

As with the Luddites, and generative AI, we should be willing to separate out what can and should be addressed, and what is ultimately not addressable. My guess is that if you could give the Luddites free and safe looms they would still object, because the core of the critique was de-skilling.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

But this is why I think it's worth being careful about these analogies. The Luddites had some good critiques (centralization of wealth and power, physical risk), and some bad ones (de-skilling).

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

The analogy seems only half apt to me, because based on a lot of the critiques of things like image generation with Stable Diffusion, there are plenty of people that would object to this technology even when it is free and open source. Would the Luddites have turned down free looms?

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

I feel like what all this discourse is circling around is really a worry that no one is -making- anyone read anymore. I increasingly think that liberals are talking themselves into positions, especially on education, that in the past twenty years would read as conservative to most folks.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

This is a huge part of why I loved these game as a kid, even though I was too young to articulate it. At the time I thought I just really liked Resident Evil and samurai (also true), but that wasn't why so many images and sounds from the game stayed in my head for years.

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charlesjpratt @charlesjpratt.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

haha, I thought everyone loved Nosferatu! My wife and I really didn't like it, but at the time it seemed like everyone was on board for a basically boring movie that I still think was way less weird than it needed to be. Didn't know the consensus on it had turned

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