Mixed Initiatives

I’m currently kicking around some ideas about trying to articulate the difference between form, function, and process.1 I’m using these terms in an idiosyncratic way, but the basic thing I’m trying to convey is: We have constructed much of our society aro…

I think there’s a misunderstanding about Borges’ short story that is mirrored in some of the fundamental misunderstandings people have about interactive narrative (and emergent systems in general).

The one thing that I think that people are misunderstanding about a language model is this idea that it knows everything and can say anything.

Today I needed a parser for a source file for dynamically composed text.1 In other words, I had a text file that described a bunch of variations in a one-off format that was particular to this text file.

There’s a curious thing about AI that we’ve known for a long time.

I’ve been thinking more about the ideas I wrote about in designing the generative dimension and walking through the generative dimension.

A while back I co-wrote a paper on Umineko no Naku Koro ni.

There’s a phrase from Mandelbrot about fractals that stuck with me: fractals are about roughness.

Some games work better with more friction.

One of the key aspects of the immersion in the original Thief was that the visible geometry matched what you could interact with more or less directly.

One consequence of the focus on the ‘game’ part of videogames has been an identification of game with game that allows the player to exhibit strategy.

Last week, we talked about practice and performance in a computational medium, using instruments to navigate an artifact space.

This week is about design space, and its navigation via software instruments.

What is a software instrument?

This post begins an essay about software instruments, which will be serialized on Tuesday evenings for the next five weeks or so.

Some folks in the community Discord for my roguelike Caves of Qud are heading an effort to write an expansive wiki for the game.

While videogames are the most obvious kinds of software to deploy aesthetic effect, my first strong impression of the size of a program was in 3D graphics.

I want to create computer programs that engage in meaningful two-way creative collaboration with human users.

In the opening moments of 2017’s Nier: Automata, the game smoothly transitions between a vertical shooter, a twin-stick shooter, a third-person melee action game, a side-scrolling platformer, and a few other modes.

Welcome to Mixed Initiatives!