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Mike Cook

@mtrc.bsky.social
4.7K followers 550 following 5K posts

AI and creativity researcher (no, not that kind of AI) at King's College London. I make things that make things. I also livecode, design games and wrote linktr.ee/next_level www.possibilityspace.org | they/he/any

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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 5h
help i'm trapped in a paper factory
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フブキ👑 Letourneau🫃(librarian) @northerniion.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
still thinking about "mario's eye view"
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Dr Florence Smith Nicholls @florencesn.bsky.social · 10h
Feeling validated for using a Tarnished Foot as a unit of measurement in Elden Ring
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 14h
Have you consider spreading clues across a mansion
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Spheal Posting @sphealposting.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
low effort spheal post showing the pokemon spheal from the pokearth youtube video in the snow looking vacant and the text says "I am both dumber and smarter than I look. do not estimate me"
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 14h
Going through old twitter bookmarks.
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Gina Gwenffrewi @ginagwenffrewi.bsky.social · 20h
Our strike continues at the University of Edinburgh for a second week. Conditions worsen for staff, but we remain resilient, and yesterday our principal announced he's stepping down. Solidarity with all who feel helpless in the face of powerful people taking what they want.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
haha yes when you put it like that i actually have a game prototype a bit like that (plus the baba is you boardgame is a bit like that too)
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.
Research [25] shows that people [26] enjoy the feeling of winning games [3,5,19]. Enjoying things can lead to longer life expectancy [2], higher economic productivity [9,22,33-40,302] and improve mental health [9]. Yet many games still include losing players [67,4]. A recent study showed that less than half of the players in a Chess [1] match win on average [42]. We have developed an LLM-driven co-creative [66], user-led [11], mixed-initiative [80] assistant for Chess [2], through which players can redefine the rules of Chess [3] using generative AI prompting such that they are the winner of Chess [4]. A study (n=3) showed that 100\% of people felt better, healthier and more self-actualised after using our tool, showing that this may be the way forward for games and human culture more broadly in the future.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
One of my favourite tweets about chess:
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Eternal Skies TCG RPG @eternalskies.neocities.org · 04/10/2026
every game would be better if the protagonist was waluigi imagine if you were playing like bioshock, and andrew ryan is all like a man chooses a slave obeys, and waluigi is like wah
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
omg if this is true i am gonna be so happy
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Every time I see the rabbit from Vib Ribbon I feel a little happier. I never even really played the game when it came out. But how can you not love this little guy.
screenshot of Vib Ribbon. A rabbit drawn from thin white lines is saying "la la la la oh, what fun!"
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Design Room @designroom.site · 05/10/2026
Big new story! The best 8,000 words you'll read on Vib-Ribbon today.
designroom.site
Vib-Ribbon: An oral history
Almost 27 years later, we round up the team behind NanaOn-Sha's procedurally generated playground to look at the legacy of PlayStation's wireframe rabbit.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Wow this is a really cool idea.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
🙏 thank you for appreciating the smaller jokes
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
@shoujo.gay Hey Shoujo! I wondered if I could ask you a few questions about some academic work I'm planning - if that sounds okay, would you be able to DM or maybe email me? mike.cook@kcl.ac.uk Thanks so much!
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The real person was there for flavour.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Hahaha no I take it as a compliment/curse that I hit the plausibility line so well.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Haha this is a joke paper I made up, but actually a student of mine did do a pretty great citation for chess *analysis* that was a book from 941 AD which I enjoyed. (ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...)
ojs.aaai.org
View of Revealing Game Dynamics via Word Embeddings of Gameplay Data
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Hahaha oh my god. I had not heard of this. I think I would die if I tried to write the whole thing though.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The paper I just finished reviewing, which prompted me to make this, honestly took a little bit of my soul away. It's nothing like my joke example in topic, for obvious reasons, but it is somehow worse in every way.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Hahaha I was messing around but I have seen worse >_>
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Haha yeah that's normally outside the author's control but it's extremely confusing to look back and forth to. Makes my eyes go funny. Also for some reason PDF readers still do not have a way to take you back to where you clicked on a citation from in 2026.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
The most unrealistic part of this joke is that the study involved three real people, lately you only get that if you're lucky.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.
Research [25] shows that people [26] enjoy the feeling of winning games [3,5,19]. Enjoying things can lead to longer life expectancy [2], higher economic productivity [9,22,33-40,302] and improve mental health [9]. Yet many games still include losing players [67,4]. A recent study showed that less than half of the players in a Chess [1] match win on average [42]. We have developed an LLM-driven co-creative [66], user-led [11], mixed-initiative [80] assistant for Chess [2], through which players can redefine the rules of Chess [3] using generative AI prompting such that they are the winner of Chess [4]. A study (n=3) showed that 100\% of people felt better, healthier and more self-actualised after using our tool, showing that this may be the way forward for games and human culture more broadly in the future.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Cake doesn’t look bad either
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Da Scary Rose @modernmodron.itch.io · 05/10/2026
Its that most wonderful time of year again, a new crop of domino club games have appeared in the pumpkin patch! domino.gallery/jams/drive-i...
domino.gallery
DRIVE-IN JAM
Drive-in Jam. Aug 29 - Oct 4, 2026
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I mentioned this briefly in the context of AI in my last blog post, but one thing you see over the last 20 years of tech is a general giving up on the idea of being efficient at anything. These numbers don't even represent what current games *need* to cost, we just have no incentive to improve it.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
via my colleague Georgia, a new publication about the environmental impact of videogames, along different axes: uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/di...
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I really love this as like, Other Places coming back the other way. Always love seeing you work on stuff.
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Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Yes, computers do everything at our company but don't worry, there's always a human reviewer. Nothing goes out the door without one of our highly trained shruggers briefly glancing at it and clicking Approve
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Alan Hazelden @alanhazelden.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I've been looking forward to this for a while - a new tool for making grid-based puzzle games! I haven't used it yet but the design goal seems like it might be "what if PuzzleScript was both more powerful and more approachable", which is very exciting to me.
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Andy Kelly @ultrabrilliant.xyz · 04/10/2026
Been teaching myself Unreal and built this moody office scene while learning the basics of lighting, VFX, camera control, animation, cinematics, and blueprints. Wanted to make it feel convincingly cluttered and lived-in, which involved placing 600+ props by hand. Sound up for maximum atmosphere.
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metal flesh express @oma-metal-flesh.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
it's almost time... once again... for the only good Video Games to be released from their alien cocoon.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Hell yeah what a look.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I have a couple more games I really want to do it for, I may do one tonight, that I know are gonna be more challenging (one is CICADAMATA", where an individual level might only take a half-minute to play through, but would take a long time to map in any kind of detail).
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Made another Bleed Map last night while playing Ostranauts, mapping the tutorial ship, part of K-LEG, an area around the asteroid and my first real ship. It’s so fun to think about mapping. And it adds a weird cadence to play that I really like.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
I keep meaning to ask, why *did* the government call you that.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
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J. L. Westover @mrlovenstein.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
So grateful I get to include this comic in my book as a way of saying thanks ❤️ kickstarter.com/projects/mrlovenstein/mr-lovenstein-presents-fun
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Hmm. Clash Royale was one I had a few mention recently. I don’t know the name of the gacha ones that are quite popular. I think a fair chunk still play the average comp shooters a lot too (on consoles/pc)
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Wowwwww.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
They’ll definitely know both I’d say? A lot of my students play mobile games now.
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noé @celechii.itch.io · 02/10/2026
HEY so 4y ago i released my game Cast Fortune as a part of the Cartomancy Anthology and as of today the anthology is ✨ FREE ON STEAM AND ITCH!! ✨ 22 games based on the major arcana! check them out!! 🎃 STEAM: store.steampowered.com/app/1869870/... 🎃 ITCH: cartomancyanthology.itch.io/cartomancy-a...
a little scarecrow character jumping through the air in a rainy swamp at dusklittle scarecrow character is soooo sleepy and dozing off in the fog by a big treescarecrow character standing on the edge of a porch overlooking the swamp on a cloudy nightscarecrow character fishing into the swamp water on a foggy but starry night saying "im so sleepy..."
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
🙂 bsky.app/profile/mtrc...
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
reviewing a terrible paper about generative ai, taking a break for my mental health by checking in on a different conversation in a different review process, also about generative ai, also terrible. living the dream.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Me giving a 9am lecture
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
i gifted unfair flips to like a dozen of my friends last night and the group chat is currently in various different stages of grief.
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