Seedship

A thoroughly enjoyable adventure game in your browser. You are the AI of a colony starship. Humanity’s future is in your hands.

Tagged with

Related links

AI Weirdness • Play AI Dungeon 2. Become a dragon. Eat the moon.

After reading this account of a wonderfully surreal text adventure game, you’ll probably want to play AI Dungeon 2:

A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.

Tagged with

Travel Oregon: The Game

Oregon Trail, updated for our times. There should be appreciably less dysentery in this game.

Tagged with

TANK (short film by Stu Maschwitz) - YouTube

This fun little film gives me all the feels for Battlezone …but then watching the excellent “making of” video really made me appreciate the love and attention to detail that went into this.

Tagged with

I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe - The Atlantic

Robin Sloan smushes the video game Fortnite Battle Royale together with Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem trilogy and produces a perfect example of game theory, cooperation, and the prisoner’s dilemma.

Based on my experiments in the laboratory of Fortnite, I think Liu Cixin is wrong. Or at least, he’s not entirely right. Fortnite is more Dark Forest theory than not, and maybe that’s true of the universe, too. But sometimes, we have a lever against the vise of game theory, and in this case, it is a single bit of communication. I mean “bit” in the programmer’s sense: a flag with a designated meaning. Nothing more. My heart emote didn’t make Fortnite cuddly and collaborative, but it did allow me to communicate: “Hold up. Let’s do this a different way.”

Tagged with

My favourite books (and games) about the apocalypse

Plague; zombie; nuclear …Anna’s got them all covered in her roundup of apocalyptic literature and games.

Tagged with