iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Todo list, 2018: Eliminate all "executive orders" imposing tariffs on Canada. Eliminate all "executive orders" imposing tariffs on European allies. Eliminate all "executive orders" imposing tariffs on Mexico and other OAS allies.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #75 Jane McGonigal Game Visionary for the Future (Maybe) Jane McGonigal first came to prominence as the mission designer for I LOVE BEES, one of the first alternative reality games (ARGs), but has since designed several other interesting and even impactful games.

lnkd.in

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

John Jefferys Weird Game Designer Fact #74 Not Actually the First Game Designer Ascribable to an Original Game As Wikipedia claims, and I may have some role in the myth (I wrote and lectured about him in the teens, when I thought that was true). But he is not. There are at least two antecedents.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Huh... someone has resurrected my 1989 game MadMaze, designed for the old Prodigy commercial online system on the web. I will not say it is a good game, but it's the first online game to achieve 1m+ users. www.vintagecomputing.com/madmaze/

vintagecomputing.com

MadMaze-II

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #73 Eric Goldberg Eric is a well regarded designer of tabletop games -- and also, for most of his life, an entrepreneur in games and mobile companies, and a consultant to early stage companies as well as to VCs looking to invest in emerging technologies.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

We posted an article on our take of the "best indie adventure games of the 21st century." It was in response to an article from a larger site, which did a "the best adventure games of the 21st century," post, which was nothing of the kind; only 1 of the 10 could remotely be called an adventure game.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I reviewed LOST AND FOUND, a short follow up to THIS BED WE MADE here: indiegamereviewer.com/lost-and-fou... As with the earlier game, you clean rooms, snoop around, and uncover mysteries about the guests. Here, however, you are stewardess aboard a cruiseship, rather than a maid in a Montreal hotel.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

My review of CALAMITY CAIT, a walking sim with minigame elements us up. Cait has anxiety issues but is into her coworker, Molly; they run whale-watching tours together off the coast of Australia's state of Victoria. It's a touching, if angsty, sapphic romance. indiegamereviewer.com/calamity-cai...

indiegamereviewer.com

Calamity Cait Review - A Short, Free, Sapphic Narrative Game

Calamity Cait is free visual novel about young love, offering both mini-games and emotional impact. Read our complete review...

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #72 Derek Yu Yu is best known for SPELUNKY (2008), a Rogue-like platformer. Let's spend a moment to contemplate how nuts that is. Good platformers =depend= on careful level design, with challenges and enemies specifically placed (by designers) to shape the user experience.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #71 Dr. Cat His birth name is Dave Shapiro, but in the field, the eminent engineer and game designer is almost universally known as Dr. Cat. His first game was CAVERNS OF FREITAG, an action-adventure RPG published for the Apple II in 1982.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts Albert Aurelius Nofi I met Al Nofi at SPI, where he was for many years associate editor of Strategy & Tactics magazine, and also the designer of many tabletop wargames. But he was a scholar, not just a game designer, receiving a PHD from CUNY in military history in 1991.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

My middle kid, Vic, has started a podcast, NEW RUST; its about Pittsburgh, where they live. In the first episode, they interview Chris Pluto, an artist who makes -- Lovecraftian crochet.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #69 Jeff Briggs Dr. Jeffrey L. Briggs served for many years as CEO of Firaxis, and has design credits on Civ III, Sid Meier's Antietam! and Sid Meier's Gettysburg! He's also one of the very few people I've totally lost my temperature to in the course of my career.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #68 Justin Ma So I guess about 3 years ago I was at GDC and attended the Old Fogey's party (yes, this is a thing, by invitation only and you have to be 50+ and in the industry for 10+ years). There, I met John Ma, whom I did not know previously.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I'm an FDR Democrat The "Democratic Socialist" brand rubs a lot of people the wrong way, if you call it that. But really, all I'm asking for is a return to American values -- the values of the 1940s and 50s.Strong regulation to ensure the safety of food and drugs?

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #67 Walter Jon Williams Nebula Award winning science fiction author Walter John Williams is best known for his DREAD EMPIRE space opera series and QUILLIFER fantasy series, but gamers should know his Dagmar Shaw novels, in which an ARG designer saves and changes the world.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #66 Tracy Fullerton I first met Tracy in the mid-90s, when she was living in NY and working at R/GA Interactive, along with my (now wife) Karen. R/GA still exists, it then was an extremely prominent digital agency, but also developed games

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #65 Thomas N. Shaw Before joining Avalon Hill, Tom Shaw was a minor league baseball player; and not surprisingly, some of the games he worked on for Avalon Hill were sports themed: BASEBALL STRATEGY and FOOTBALL STRATEGY.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #64 Emily Short I first met Short when I was running a website called Play This Thing that reviewed indie games of all sorts; she was something of a guru in the Interactive Fiction (IF) field.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 20/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #63 Charles S. Roberts Charles Roberts is generally acknowledged as the creator of the modern board wargame, albeit this claim is open to challenge.

zeitgame.net

Translation of the introduction and rules to Hellwig’s Kriegsspiel (1803) – The Wargaming Scribe

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #62 Noah Falstein Noah got his start at Milton Bradley's short-lived videogames division; his first published game was the arcade title SINISTAR (Williams Electronics, 1983), famous from the eponymous opponent's synthesized audio, "I live! Run run run beware coward, run!"

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #61 Joseph M. Balkoski I worked with Joe Balkoski at SPI, and also shepherded several of his freelance games through the publication process when running the design/art/editorial departments at West End Games.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 17/07/2026

In 1983, after a conversation with Jeff Dee at a conference (where we agreed that a game based on cartoons probably wasn't viable), I went home decided why not? Assuming it couldn't reasonably by a stand alone project, I wrote the first iteration of TOON

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #59 John M. Ford Mike Ford (as he was known to his friends, and I was one), was a multiple World Fantasy Award winning author, and a "writers' writer." Meaning "an author who was greatly admired by other writers" without every achieving great commercial success.

en.wikipedia.org

John M. Ford - Wikipedia

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #58 Rhianna Pratchett One of the field's most eminent and well regarded narrative designers, Pratchett is best known for her work on the Overlord series, more recent Tomb Raider games, and Heavenly Swords.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #57 J.K. Rowling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Hermann Hesse Since my last post was about game designers who wrote interesting novels about this field, this post will be about novelists who describe games that are kind of craps.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 11/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #56 Austin Grossman, Richard Dansky, Hal Barwood Novels about games that actually impart what it's like to be a game developer In recent years, there have been novels about game development that are completely implausible.

en.wikipedia.org

Austin Grossman - Wikipedia

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #55 Jesse Schell Schell is a former Disney Imagineer, CEO of Schell Games, author of The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, and Distinguished Professor of Practice for Carnegie-Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center, where he teaches about game design and development.

store.steampowered.com

Mission: It's Complicated on Steam

Mission: It’s Complicated is a narrative-based, visual novel where you match super-awesome superheroes to go on missions during the night and dates during the day. The more compatible the pair of supe...

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #54 Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig Hellwig (1743 - 1831) was a mathematician, university professor, and entomologist who, in 1780, published the first board wargame.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #53 Mike Pondsmith I've known Pondsmith for many years, because everyone involved in TTRPG design in the 80s knew each other. He was CA based, and I in NY, and I imagine we first got to know each other at a GenCon.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #52 Reiner Knizia Reiner Knizia has designed more than 800 commercially published games. Let that sink in for a minute. I do know of designers with more than 100 credits to their name, including George Parker and Jim Dunnigan, but 800 is astonishing.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #51 Keita Takahashi You may not know Takahashi by name, but you probably know KATAMARI DAMACY (2004), a cult hit in which you roll up the world in increasingly larger balls, while being lectured, by your Daddy in the Sky who tells you what a loser you are

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #50 Janell Jaquays All right, I'm going to (again) violate rule #1 for talking about trans people, which is "don't mention the dead name." This was pretty easy with Danielle Bunten Berry, because she was quite open about her transition.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #49 George S. Parker When I was a kid, virtually every game for sale in the US was published either by Milton Bradley or by Parker Brothers, both companies Massachusetts-based (Bradley in Springfield, Parker in Salem).

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #48 Christine Love Love is one of my favorite indie developers. I first noticed her work with DIGITAL: A LOVE STORY, a sort of visual novel love story carried in text, with the frame being that you are interacting with an 80s BBS.

itch.io

Download the latest indie games

itch.io is a simple way to find, download and distribute indie games online. Whether you're a developer looking to upload your game or just someone looking for something new to play itch.io has you co...

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #47 John Butterfield Butterfield has had a long career in tabletop gaming, but is by far the most interesting designers of soloplay boardgames. I first worked with Butterfield at SPI, in the 1970s.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #46 Orson Scott Card So... multiple Hugo and Nebula Award winning author (and notorious homophobe) Orson Scott Card, whose landmark novel Ender's Game is used in grade school English classes across America, is a game designer?

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

My review of The Berlin Apartment is up here: indiegamereviewer.com/the-berlin-a... It's a narrative game set in a single apartment, but with each episode in a different era (from 1933 to recent years), all in the same apartment, but with different tenants and core mechanics.

lnkd.in

This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #45 Greg Stafford I first encountered Stafford as a teen; he published a fanzine that I'm not finding evidence of online now, but that predates his involvement with games, but he was already writing about his world of Glorantha.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 27/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #44 Sid Meier Sid is one of the designers I admire most, but the problem with talking about him here is that he is NOT weird. He is the antithesis of weird. He is a boring, conventional person...

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #43 Stewart Butterfield Butterfield is, oddly enough, the creator of two failed online games. And now a billionaire. What? How does that work? In 2002, he founded a company called Ludicorp, to work on his vision for a sandbox style MMORPG called The Game Neverending.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

I was interviewed for the Ludological Alchemy podcast (about TTRPGs) by Luke Crane and Samuel Roberts, both game studies academics about my RPG designs. Crane is also the designer of the Burning Wheel TTRPG and others. ludologicalalchemy.substack.com/p/the-hypoth...

ludologicalalchemy.substack.com

The Hypothesis Volume 3: Episode 02

Interview with game design titan, Greg Costikyan — designer of Toon, Paranoia and Star Wars.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #42 Rich Dansky Dansky is one of the most prominent narrative designers in the game industry, and is the author of THE VIDEOGAME WRITER'S GUIDE TO SURVIVING AN INDUSTRY THAT HATES YOU, a title title typical of his wryly humorous sensibility.

richarddansky.com

Welcome to The Official Website of Richard Dansky — Author, Video Game, & RPG Writer

Welcome to the official website of author, video game, and RPG writer Richard Dansky. Please broswe the galleries of Richard's work and follow his blog.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Fact #41 Bill Markham and Reuben Klamer (also Milton Bradley) Markham and Klamer "invented" (the term game designer was not then in general use) the game of Life, for Milton Bradley (the company, not the person) in 1960.

Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 20/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #39 M.A.R. Barker Barker is best known to gamers as the designer of Empire of the Petal Throne, first published by TSR in 1974, and one of the earliest TTRPGs. He was also an eminent scholar of South Asian culture and languages.

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Greg Costikyan @costik.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

Weird Game Designer Facts #37 Cosmo D Also known as Greg Heffernan, but professionally as Cosmo D, is the designer of Betrayal at Club Low, which won both the IGF Nuovo and Seamus McNally Grand Prize Awards, IGF's two most prominent awards, in 2022.

cosmod.net

Cosmo D – Maker of Digital Games in Brooklyn, NY