iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

jmargaris.substack.com/p/a-plea-for... Some people are saying "it's a new essay." On writing dialogue that reflects what a character might genuinely think, on posing the wrong questions, and 10 paragraphs on "yeah armor -- good idea."

“What if a Starfleet ship was manned by regular folks like you and me? One has constant emotional breakdowns and can’t stop discussing their trauma, one freezes up in combat, one regularly screws up then hides their mistakes, and one is insubordinate? You know — relatable stuff.”

Maybe that’s a compelling question, but here’s the answer: that ship would fucking explode two weeks after leaving Space Dock.

Zoe De Vera, the woman on the headset, is a handler for the Federal Bureau of Control. It’s her job (I gather) to keep agents informed and lend them the best chance of success.

If there’s an eldritch abomination ahead that can melt my brain with a piercing scream you should tell me that, not say “you’ll know it when you hear it.”

This is not the time to be cute or coy. “Just try to stay alive out there, okay?” Help me do that by giving me relevant information. That is, in fact, your job!

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 17h

I'm sure there are plenty of good romance novels but many romance readers WANT formula. This is incredibly obvious if you visit the places where they hang out and observe that they speak mostly in terms of checklist characters and plot points.

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Reposted by James Margaris

Mason Remaley @masonremaley.bsky.social · 22h

Now You're Cooking! is a roguelike deckbuilder about running your own restaurant. Cook delicious meals, build an extravagant menu, and keep your patrons happy. Did I mention that rent doubles every month? Boosts much appreciated!! :) #gamedev #indiedev

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Many, if not most, games that invite steamers / influencers / "top players" to tests and then act on their feedback.

Forum post asking for examples of games that got worse due to player feedback?

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Reposted by James Margaris

Lindsey Wailes (looking for work!) @linwail.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I made a LinkedIn post asking for help today. If anyone knows of ANY full time roles with a livable wage please reach out. I really need the help. Thank you.❤️ 🔗My email: lindseywailes@gmail.com 🎬Demo Reel: vimeo.com/1082323434 🎨Artstation: www.artstation.com/linwail lnkd.in/p/gHmJg4N9

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

I could write A LOT about this. UO basically has to show you the odds because fights are incredibly swingy due to the game mechanics. In one fight you might go first, kill a key guy, then wipe the enemy team while barely taking damage, but with different RNG they wipe you instead.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I have no interest in the top 100 list of shows because without checking I am confident that they made the right pick for #1, La Brea, and that's all that really matters.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Throughout Phil Spencer's run at XBox the standard line was that he was fixing Mattrick's mistakes and his hands were tied, having been backed into a corner by Mattrick. Now the people who said that for a decade have immediately pivoted to Sharma is fixing Spencer's mistakes and her hands are tied.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The only modern Bungie game I've played is Marathon and it's shocking to me how much they cater to "influencers" in ways that make the game clearly worse. And in the case of Marathon those influences don't promote or even play the game anyway, even while being constantly catered to.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Strange New Worlds has had one of the most precipitous declines of any TV show ever, and I assume the reason people aren't talking about it more is that nobody watches it. It's not a case of main actors leaving or the show being retooled either - it just got way, way, way worse.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Politics (and some other disciplines) is now dominated by people who have no idea what competence entails and can only glom onto signifiers. Being good at war isn't planning or readiness or supply lines, it's looking tough - maybe you smoke cigars, that's a thing tough guys in movies do.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Systems like these tend to hyper-focus on blunt language use so you get these just asking questions decorum demeanor dudes who argue 8 hours a day every day and never get penalized, while the guy who says "man please shut the **** up" gets muted.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Why are there a half-dozen Snowpiercer-inspired games coming out now? Was the movie playing constantly on TNT 3 years ago? (I'm not complaining, just asking!)

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

This is why I say over and over that people who think these matrix multiplications are alive should play with image generation. When there is no text being output - so nothing that we closely associate with human thought - how these systems work and how dumb they are is much more obvious.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I'm not sure if there's any current trend in the game industry more pathetic than CEOs of European gaming companies trying to be Donald Trumps.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I was watching some Wolverine: Origins Let's Play videos yesterday for research and a whole bunch of the game takes place in tombs lol. That said it was pretty neat, a lot of enemy variety, Wolverine has custom animations for different enemy types, punching a dude and they go flying never got old

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I think that SmellVision is probably just a bad idea. "It's a visual line on the ground that represents smells" is fundamentally just uncool, and it really doesn't make sense to have a trail of smell leading a random object. (I guess a smelly person put that bottle there)

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

I wonder what's happening here? When you open the menu it saves resources by freezing the game and displaying a fixed screen of the gameplay, and each each frame re-captured before display so it includes more DLSS? (Something like that) But yes DLSS5 is not a "lighting pass" at all.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Both movies and the anime are all great. I even like the dub of the anime, in a throwback sort of way.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Weird alien with a crazy hat who wants to suck your life energy? Clearly that's Zeiram. (The double stacked eyes are reminiscent of Zieram's little mini face thing as well)

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Using "Knack' creator" to describe Cerny is violence.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Good video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DoH... I was thinking about writing on this topic but now there's no need I guess. Key point: a remake is safer in that it's existing IP, has a built-in audience, etc, but another huge factor is all the design is done.

youtube.com

Why Video Game Developers Love Remakes

YouTube video by Jason Schreier

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I feel like few if any people can wrap their heads around the breadth of current problems. I think back to 90s comic books which suffered from a dozen different problems that all came to a boil at once, some related, some mostly unrelated.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Before it was revealed the most popular theory I saw was that it was a personal hoverboard thing like from Back to the Future 2. Good lesson in managing expectations.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

I didn't see this at all today, you guys are slipping!

Transporter Chief / Head of DS9 Ops, Miles Edward O'Brien, saying "he was more than a hero. He was a union man."

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

One of the weird side aspects of me vs 100 Tufts econ grads (who would win in a fight, place your bets) is the number of genuinely super left-wing guys fighting tooth and nail to defend the honor of a man who recently joined a think tank that exists primarily to fight against trans-activist groups.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

At the risk of being rude: a y-axis that makes sense is pretty important for a chart! This is not "catechism" or "cargo cults" but more "charts are supposed to convey meaningful information." BTW impossible to not notice how much these guys lean on "I bet this guy went to community college."

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

At any time I am happy to nicely explain my various objections to Will Stancil, which I made very clear to him. He has no interest in that, presumably because that wouldn't make for good social media drama, which seems to be the only thing in life he cares about.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

There's an extremely specific critique and you're quoted in it!

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Side note this is a great way to get the Stancil's of the world to stop bothering you. The only angle they care about is farming drama so if you offer to talk to them calmly and privately, where it's not "content", they immediately lose interest. Just a handy pro tip!

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

By the way I know you guys don't make your own charts, I've said that over and over again! You find charts online that you don't understand then share them like memes. That is one of my most consistent criticisms! "Why do people dislike me?!?!?" You're aggressively ignorant, for one.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

This is one of the main charts the Stancel's use to "prove" that the "vibecession" is real. The y-axis here is completely tucked! This is a chart of two different sets of questions that *had different answer sets*, and the y axis is "percentage of people who gave a top 2 response." ????

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The 2XKO team keeps pumping out blog posts like "here's how we chose our great name" (it's terrible!), "here's our well-oiled patch process" (takes a long time and still buggy), "here's out great playtest process" (game is shutting down because it's not fun) etc. So weird!

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Games will do a lot of very complex things that require a ton of smarts then screw up basics like deadzones, aspect ratios (making the window wider makes you see less instead of more - common Unreal issue), etc.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

There's already a mod that mods out the time pressure of Blood of Dawnwalker - which is the most interesting part of the game! I get people not liking real-time clocks like in Dead Rising but passing time in Dawkwalker is something you opt into and it forces you to make choices.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I don't know why "decomp" and "recomp" are getting lumped together. Stealing source code and compiling it is an entirely different universe from reverse engineering the code from the executable bits and gameplay.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I suspect that many (most?) developers would be better off if they hired people more people who were interested in doing a good job but not necessarily passionate about that particular subgenre, for many reasons, including bringing a dispassionate outsider perspective.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

On substack there's a craze where self-congratulatory "rational" people are "proving" God exist by saying - I swear this is not made up - "200 years ago a guy knew a guy who lost an eye and then it grew back" docseuss.medium.com/its-not-enou...

docseuss.medium.com

it’s not enough to build something, part 2: you must be aware that someone will play the video game

Years ago, a teen pitched an idea to me: “what if you wrote a story about an alien from the perspective of an alien?”

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 29/08/2026

For over a week now Darling and his circle of friends, including "finance guys", ex Biden admin guys, and college professors, have steadfastly refused to admit that a percentage and a raw count are two different things. " argument grounded in good faith, evidence-based reason-giving" lololololol

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

I don't think it's "insane" to point out that if you're going to post a chart as an argument that you should first read the title of the chart, the y-axis of the chart, or the numbers on the chart, and discover that you're using the completely wrong chart!

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Are you really defending a "social media economist" (actually a Democratic consultant working with Fetterman's main man at an anti-left think tank) who thinks 2,000 is 2% or has been casually lying about it for months so that he can win arguments online?

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

The second one is very comedic they should have an Olympics of robots being silly.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I think if you're an expert on data centers, constantly writing about how much sound and heat they make, how much other people should want to live next to them, etc, you should probably have seen one, at least in photos! And it takes legit 5 seconds to google photos!

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Andy Masley, who acts as an expert on data centers, wrote a blog post claiming they black roofs, because Claude told him they have black roofs. He has never seen a data center (at least, from the top) in real life or even in photos - they have white roofs. "Lot to unpack here."

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Taking a one hour course on sexual harassment - will this become my alt-right origin story?

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

I'm not sure how often you realistically run into a scenario like "I need a picture of 3 people in an ancient tomb and I need it in an hour" but when you do simply use your encyclopedic knowledge of video games to find art from Konami's Dark Adventure / Devil World.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

HOLY SHIT I WAS RIGHT. I jokingly suggested that Matt Darling, economist extraordinaire, thought the layoff rate in the US was 2% because he thought a comma was a decimal point AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED lol. That's a raw number not a percentage!!

Chart of layoffs BY RAW NUMBER NOT BY RATE

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

In interviews and blog posts 2XKO people keep pointing to duos mode as like THE MAIN THING of the game, including why the game is named 2XKO - you can play with a friend. But then you play the game in duos and the UI is wonky and some of the content isn't available.

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Dark Castle is my go-to example whenever people try to say that the artsy indie game was invented in 2009. 1986, small team, great aesthetic. It was a Mac game so not a lot of people are familiar with it but it was really impressive at the time. (And in retrospect I guess)

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James Margaris @markymarg2.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

I only started talking about Matt Darling because he decided to weigh in on video games (lol) to say that XBox layoffs weren't unusual. His claim, unsourced, was that "economy wide background layoff is 2% a month" but the widely accepted authoritative source is about half that.

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