One underappreciated strength of Mastodon will become apparent in the coming months and years: its openness to third-party developers 🧵 Because they need to show ads, Twitter has made it nigh-on impossible for custom app devs to make a living due to API restrictions.

That’s despite many Twitter features being invented by custom apps: character counts, replies, conversations, etc. furbo.org/2011/03/11/twi…

Fantastic @annehelen piece on male-coded/dominated hobbies like golf, fishing, and hunting being different from female ones: they require way more time and are out-of-home.

So: is there any research on different video games/genres played by women vs. men? annehelen.substack.com/p/who-gets-qua… I feel like any discussion of this kind of thing got annihilated, somewhat understandably, from the whole “lol girls don’t play games > women play games just as much as men, and they play EXACTLY the same things!!!”

Maybe there is no difference – which would also be interesting!

Really important and tragic story about the destruction wreaked by the gambling industry.

There’s one other thing in it that I found unexpectedly sad, though… theguardian.com/society/2022/n… Hannah talks about “being nominated for awards” as an actual triumph in life, unlike winning at gambling.

Awards can be a pleasure to receive but it’s dangerous to treat them as triumphs. You can be an excellent writer or artist or designer and never, ever get nominated.

Listening to nerds complain about Mastodon is a lesson in why they don’t want to be forced to trust anyone other than big corporations “How could instances possibly moderate content?!” I don’t know, the same way it worked before Twitter? Let’s stop pretending there is one true way of running a social network that’ll work perfectly forever.

Me hearing Twitter Blue compared to pay-to-win games:

“That’s like a baby’s toy!”

Here’s what REAL gamification would look like, including a Twitter Battle Pass, Achievements, Happy Hour, Streaks, and more! 🧵 1. TWITTER BATTLE PASS

💰 1000 T-Bucks (~$10) per season (2x during US elections).

Includes exclusive emojis, profile labels, and hashtags, unlocked by levelling your XP across various themed challenges (e.g. 10 tweets on #SpaceX today).

Expires after 3 months.

Disappointed by Norris’ dismissal of social media as a major factor in recent social and political change, despite Ezra pushing her on it; Father Coughlin on the radio really isn’t the same thing nytimes.com/2022/11/01/opi… Talking about “visual browsers” from the 90s doesn’t fill me with confidence that you understand how Twitter and TikTok is different from Usenet

Important piece by @maxwellstrachan. The conversation around exploitative hyper-monetised games needs to go beyond "they're all whales" (they aren't) and "it's the player's fault" (victim blaming). vice.com/en/article/g5v… These techniques might not work on everyone, but they work frighteningly well on some – to the tune of thousands of dollars.

Can anyone claim this in anyone's best interests other than the developer and their investors? It's certainly not about having *fun*.

LOVE this deep dive interview of @betterthemask on battling colonialism and capitalism through the lens of narrative game design. Incredibly thoughtful (and with gorgeous photos)! nme.com/features/gamin… This is a great way to think about the *point* of advancing in your career in games – it's not just to make more money or make bigger games, it's so you can use your position to start challenging conversations and improve conditions for everyone.

Since The Trojan Horse Affair podcast was released, it's been #1 on Apple Podcasts for two straight weeks in both the UK and US.

Despite its enormous popularity and its serious, political subject matter, there's been silence, dismissal, and denial in the British press 🧵 FT: "It’s the kind of wild conspiracy theory that should be ideal podcast fodder, but Reed and Syed find themselves faced with an insurmountable problem: trying to make the minutiae of local politics exciting."

Nothing on the substance. ft.com/content/74de7d…

Sodha criticises the Serial podcast by saying it contradicts the findings of public bodies… that the podcast thinks are flawed? This isn’t the slam-dunk she thinks it is theguardian.com/commentisfree/… e.g. she says “…a claim dismissed as false by an employment tribunal judge” when the hosts go into a tremendous amount of detail explaining why the employment tribunal was flawed

🧵 First impressions of Peloton Lanebreak, its new gamified workout, from the lead designer and co-creator of @ZombiesRunGame!

Spoiler: It's polished, music-centric, and kind of fun - but it's limited by the hardware and it's surprisingly uninteractive 1. You can read how it works below, but basically you get points by cycling over beats or within lanes, and you switch lanes by increasing the resistance: left is easy, right is hard.

There are no other controls other than cadence (how quickly you pedal) blog.onepeloton.com/lanebreak/

A thread of things that stood out to me as a game designer reading Sid Meier's Memoir!

1. Sid doesn't write game design documents! A man of my own heart (except when I really have to write them). 2. Games are here to give you a good idea, not ask you to do uncomfortable soul-searching. Clearly not a fan of The Last of Us 2, then.

A short thread on what it was like to speak at the flagship TED11 conference in 2001 at the age of 18, apropos @scarschwartz asking what happened to the future that TED envisioned... thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-t… 1/ When I was 18, I spoke at the flagship TED11 conference Monterey in 2001. I argued for the human exploration of Mars, a talk which in retrospect wasn't anything special other than for the relative youth of the person delivering it.

I adore every part of this Céline Sciamma profile by Elif Batumen, but here are two bits that struck me deeply:

1. The way to only do what you want is by being strong enough to *not* do what you *don’t* want newyorker.com/magazine/2022/… 2. What if life is all one thing, and not a bunch of trade-offs between “work” and “life”?

2022 Booklist Thread!

Book 1: Matrix by Lauren Groff. Lush, fierce, pacy historical fiction, but its rise-and-rise plot left me a little flat.

2021 thread 👇

https://twitter.com/adrianhon/status/1353364637140410372

Book 2: Civilisations by Laurent Binet. What a banger! The best thriller I've read in years, such a richly-researched, entertaining, imaginative alternate history. The less you know going in, the better.

Thanks to @naomialderman for the rec!

Reading Ursula Franklin’s excellent book The Real World of Technology (1989) and wondering what she’d make of this passage still being entirely accurate three decades on It’s striking how some of the best, most accessible writing about technology and society is from the 20th century; Neil Postman, Langdon Winner, Ursula Franklin, Lewis Mumford, etc. @libshipwreck has a very good piece on this librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com/2021/11/18/aga…

QAnon isn't an ARG, but ARGs can teach us why QAnon is so popular – and how to restore the lack of trust that led to QAnon's rise.

This 5700 word post draws on my 19 years of playing, documenting, designing, and running ARGs. Share and enjoy! mssv.net/2020/08/02/wha… Thanks to the many people whose replies and work I cited, including @hondanhon @JoshFialkov @annehelen @typhoonjim @mjandersen @gabrielroth @lauraehall and more!

Theory: QAnon is popular partly because the act of “researching” it through obscure forums and videos and blog posts, though more time-consuming than watching TV, is actually *more enjoyable* because it’s an active process.

Game-like, even; or ARG-like, certainly. This has always been part of the appeal of conspiracies and the occult, but I feel like QAnon is one of the first to have done this deliberately in a very online, responsive, real-time manner.