2026-03-02 02:05:00
I think we should shit on any art that uses generative AI; no exceptions, no matter what it’s being used for.
I read Future Perfect post, and it inspired me to talk about it. He talks about the frustration of hearing others talk shit about a local band’s poster that used AI, and he says:
Like, for fuck’s sake! These guys probably barely had enough money to pay the sound engineer, let alone a decent graphic artist for their time and efforts.
And I completely understand the point. But I could very well be one of those people talking shit about that other band’s poster—not because I “hate” AI, or because it’s my personal crusade, but because they very well could have made something with their own hands instead of using generative AI or even paying a graphic designer.
When I was about to finish high school, I went through a really fun phase where I attended battle-of-the-bands events every week. Several of my friends formed bands, and at one point I even dared to get on stage and play with them despite my teenage anxiety and almost nonexistent musical talent.
It was incredibly inspiring to see how a community of alternative music lovers, in a small town like mine, made these events happen to keep the scene alive.
Part of what made it cool was seeing that each band had its own identity; not just through the kind of music they played, but through how they dressed, their stage presence, the name that represented them and… their logo and event poster.
It’s kind of amazing to think about how, back in 2011, a group of 17-year-old kids managed to design their own logos and make the event posters (some bands even designed mascots) with the little knowledge—and even fewer resources—they had.
Of course, there was always one logo that stood out more than the others, and there was never a shortage of some kid making fun of an event poster because it wasn’t as well done as event X or Y. But at the end of the day, those people had an identity, and no matter how amateur it looked, it was theirs.
If you let AI represent you, I wouldn’t be surprised if the response you get is rejection. Because it’s no longer just about your band’s identity being generic, sadly, you're being part of a larger problem that’s affecting society on multiple levels.
And honestly, I think the big problem is looking at generative AI through this lens that sometimes feels like a big “What do you want me to do? I don’t know graphic design! I had to use AI". These poor people without time and skill but with a subscriptions to ChatGPT.
Brother, sister — try learning. Try “trying and failing” for once. Try asking that friend who knows a thing or two about Photoshop for a favor. I know it’s hard, but let’s not act like there’s no other choice but to use generative AI when we’ve always managed to cope and thrive without it.
I think it’s important to call out generative AI in art and show our rejection of it, because normalizing its use (even more than it already is) could permanently distance us from what makes us connect with our essence, and eventually, with each other.
2026-03-01 11:58:00
I’d been feeling all kinds of uneasy ahead of the currently-ongoing Stress Test for Marathon (2026), in that I had such a potently bad experience last couple go-arounds that I told myself I’d swear off it for good. Pushed to tears at one point during a previous network test, I hit what I think is a reasonable barrier of “I can’t do this again” and eventually felt comfortable with having that be that. It’s not for me, it will be for some, I’ve got a backlog of years of games to play. I’ll be fine!
I would save this for the end of a post, usually, but I think I should clarify at the outset here that this is my own perspective on this, and I am in no way passing judgement on anyone or saying this is, like, any kind of universal truth. It should hopefully be pretty clear that these are my feelings, so don’t take this as me criticising anyone. I have been having some very nasty internal feelings about all of this, and I want to write it down because I think there’s probably value to be found in the perspective. That’s all.
Alas, I’m sitting here, kind of mad at myself, because people around me are finding joy in something I can’t. A poisonous state of mind to be in. Why do I feel this way?
I spent a good chunk of the earliest playtest picking apart why I struggled with it from a mostly-gameplay perspective and while the game has gone considerable changes in pace and balance, I think that mostly still applies. This post isn’t about that. There’s something experiential about Marathon that percolates a misery in me, something that goes beyond how the guns feel or how long the revive timers are. What could possibly emotionally break me in a multiplayer videogame in a way that has never happened to me, not in hundreds of hours of Call of Duty, Straftat, Valorant, Apex, etc.
A discussion about the game, and extraction shooters in general, came up in a friend group earlier and some folks described the game in a way that I think put some stuff into place.
if everyone is hostile it's boring. if everyone's friendly it's boring. but when everyone's a big question mark it's exciting
And,
the game absolutely does bend towards encouraging you to be hostile, which makes the fact that you have the tools to communicate and not always be aggressive more potent. i’ve had three very memorable games so far where either someone requested a truce and i relented or i asked someone to let us pass and they did. without the hostile bent those moments mean less to me
It’s was a really concise summary of the experience Marathon is trying to create as an extraction shooter set “on a hostile world”, and it’s a set of sentences I was rotating in my head for most of school this afternoon. Why does this bother me so much. Not my friends saying this, I love them, but why does an experience that gets players to think this way create a feeling in me that makes me, like, ill.
I transitioned about a decade ago at this point (I did not realise it was that long ago until now, what the fuck) and many realities about being trans have had so long to sink in that it’s, just, life now. Clothes fit weird, meds are expensive, news cycles are a perpetual pear-wiggler, all that fun stuff. It’s fine! You live and you adjust.
The thing that for me, 10 years later, is as bad now as it was then is interacting with the outside world. It’s more than just “passing”, it’s having to steel myself the moment I step out the front door. I have errands to run today, will I be misgendered? How many people will look at me on the street on the way there? How many of them will clearly judge me when looking at me? Will any of them be hostile to me? Which one of them has read the wrong news article today? Are the interactions I’m having different than, I dunno, the 50-year old guy waiting behind me in line at the coffee shop? Even in a more-welcoming-than-most Canada, my guard has to be up to a degree where I probably come off pretty reserved and insular. I hate it. I can’t spend time thinking about it, because if I do I get really depressed. I cannot be myself unless I am in a closed environment where my emotional safety is guaranteed. This is not the normal human experience.
This is not a problem unique to me but I also recognize it’s a problem some transgender people don’t have. Some people have confidence! A lot of it! Some people are better about having their guard up or confronting others when they’re made to feel uncomfortable. I am not that person. I am compromised by anxiety, minimal confidence, and years of trauma. I cannot be the person society needs me to be to blend in or participate seamlessly. Being outside with my wife or my friends is essential because they’re a safety net, and without it I am left to a world that sees me one way when I exist as another.
The world, not literally but spiritually, is a really hostile place to be in. Existing is entirely dependent on my ability to not emotionally crash out from dysphoria, so every interaction requires me to place a level of trust in people that I’m not really sure any cis or non-minority really think about. On the best of days, it happens without me even thinking about it but on most days it is a persistent noise. An emotional tinnitus that I would give anything in the world to be rid of.
Core to the extraction shooter experience is the tension that you are at the mercy of every other players’ will, much like their mercy is at yours. The permanence of your items creates the stakes of the prisoner’s dilemma you’re subjected to, the genre being built on the organic and impossible-to-predict nature of those interactions. You are not forced to fight each other, but whoever wins is rewarded with the spoils of the one who loses.
That trust “check” that I was talking about is what’s happening here, right. You are put into a situation where the both of you can walk away unscathed, where no one gets hurt, but now you’re given an incentive to “win”. This is obviously not how two people meeting in the real world think, I’m not dumb I realise that, but a critical part of how we interact with the world is being gamified. Conceptually, that’s really fascinating and I understand why the genre is being explored by many as a result! What happens when, in a controlled environment, you subject people to a pressure cooker. We’re humans! The result will never be the same twice and that’s interesting!
The thing is that, like, I’ve played Tarkov? And Marauders, and ARC, and… probably one or two more I’m forgetting. DMZ? Whatever the COD one was. Not extensively, I have mostly walked away from all of those going “Neat, not for me though!”, but enough to wonder why the hell Marathon feels so much meaner than all of those ever did. They’re all built off the same foundation, why is Marathon that had me so fraught that I cried over it.
I don’t really know how much this ends up mapping out to player behavior, but what I think that makes Marathon stand out amidst the rest is that you play as Heroes. Like, in-the-Overwatch-sense ‘heroes’. If you don’t have a gun, you still have a “kit” of skills and tools to do something, and that something is almost-universally built around engaging in combat. Seeker mines, radar, stealth, missile barrages, etc. No matter your objective or desired experience in a given match, your lingua franca is the ability to fight. In ARC or Tarkov, you’re just, a guy. You either start with no gun, or with a pea shooter. From the outset, you are weak.
In ARC, that weakness is exacerbated by powerful and plentiful PvE enemies, the PvP element is an added danger certainly but they’re far from the primary threat. It’s what makes organic co-operation so powerful! There is a non-zero chance that you encounter another player with no good tools or ability to fight, and vice-versa. You both understand the baseline you come from, the odds you face as weaklings, an immediate form of respect is built around it, and I believe it’s the foundation to what makes that game a success and a pretty tense-but-otherwise friendly experience.¹
Marathon’s heroes and kits teach you that the primary mode of interaction with the world is not “exist as a person” but engage. There is no peaceful way to use a shoulder-mounted missile and, maybe more cynically, there is no good reason to assume that a gamer will look at a button with an ability and not just press it when given the chance. It’s free. It has a cooldown, but in a game of punishing pertinence to its weaponry, these are the one thing you will always and forever have. You are given a language to speak with and it’s not proximity chat.² The game is not literally telling you to be hostile but how does it facilitate other venues? Does it make encounters less frequent, emphasizing how risky it would be to die after so much progress made? Does it provide you with gestures or signage to immediately show amnesty if you don’t have a microphone plugged in? Are you given opportunities to organically work with other players as often as you’re given opportunities to fight them?
Moreover, the field in Marathon is pretty level. You, other players, and the UESC are all of equal threat. The game wants this! Everything hits equally hard, everything dies as often. The inability to visually distinguish players from UESC, I feel, is by design in that regard. Everything is a threat. The world exists in a way for you to perceive everything as something that wants you dead. Would it not make clear differentiation if it didn’t, both visually and mechanically? "The purpose of a system is what it does” and so forth, right. It gives you the option to broker peace but how is it stacking those odds in favor of other possibilities.
There’s a toxicity to extraction games that’s inherent to a genre built on “you can take advantage of players’ trust” but the audience for those games so far have been pretty self-selecting. Marathon feels like a step above that, where the density of its systems and mechanics laid its desires bare to a degree I couldn’t handle anymore. It asks players to be vulnerable in a game where the primary language is aggression and deceit. This is not any different from other extraction shooters, in the end. It's what the genre is. But the repeated degree to which I experienced the cruelty of this across some 50-odd hours total was just too much for me to bear. Maybe I got unlucky. It is statistically improbable but possible that I just rolled 1s over and over and over and over. The more I played though, the more my mindset changed to how I could take advantage of a given situation to screw other players over because those are the tools I was given. My scans got better, our backstabs got stealthier, our opening shots got more ambitious, and the consequences of fighting got so much heavier.
I spend so much of my life having to be on edge that today might be the day someone ruins my week, surviving only by trusting others knowing I am rolling dice every time. Why am I playing a game that mimics this betrayal of trust and gamifies it. I couldn’t handle it. I can’t handle a game who’s primary mode of interaction is to expose them to the constant mental calculus I have to do and tell them there’s a net benefit to hurting the other person. I think there's an underestimation on how some people don't need coping mechanisms for this kind of thing, in conversations and approaches to the genre. Most people live in a world where there is no resistance to their existence alone, and the aggression I see mirrored here is invisible to them outside of the game. To many, it's an unknown and interesting thing to experience instead of an exhausting constant.
I don’t think this is solved by getting rid of “heroes”, I don’t think this is solved by giving players a big white flag hologram you can throw up. This is not a thing I’m writing because I have an answer, or even an insight on how the game is built or anything. It’s just thoughts and if I don’t get them out, my tummy hurts. It got me kinda thinking in the end about how these were, to some degree, the same accusations laid against From's Souls series all the way up to Elden Ring. If you play online, you open yourself up to invasions. You can open the door to other players and have them help you, but the door stays open for an aggressor to come in and fuck all of you up. The devil's bargain you sign to experience a new kind of interaction, (initially) powered by the PS3’s ability to be online in a way the previous generation couldn’t. All of those games, however, let you play offline. If this was not an experience you wanted, if this was not a deal you wanted to make, you could opt-out.
This is really not helped by everything else Marathon is doing that is extremely up my alley. It is a far-future dystopian hard sci-fi game about corporations pilfering a failed colonization attempt, where sentient artificial and extra-terrestrial intelligences seek to advantageously strike on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for power. Its art design is one of the most vibrant and bold depictions of fabricated space I’ve ever seen. The UESC (PvE enemies) are INCREDIBLY fun to fight, challenging in a way that is akin to Bungie’s hallmark “Legendary” difficulties. It is, for lack of a better term, “made for me”. Maybe more important than all, my friends whom I care deeply about poured their heart and souls into this for years. I cannot stress this enough that, despite everything I’ve written here, there is nothing I want more in the world than to love this game.
I am weak and I have survived this far only from the kindness of others, and I have been unable to process something I want to adore so much adopt and encourage a hostility that spiritually breaks me.
¹: You do not have to hand it to ARC Raiders, a game compromised by its willful and proud usage of generative AI. I’m comparing the two games’ approaches here but let me be unequivocal in saying: fuck that game, fuck Embark, and if you play it you should stop.
²: I have not delved into this because it’s less about the experience the game cultivates and more about “existing as a trans person” but the audiences for these games hold proximity chat as a kind of staple of the genre, which any trans person will tell you is basically like sticking your head in a guillotine. I refuse to elaborate on why I don’t want to talk into a microphone at another player and inevitably retort “I go by she/her, actually”.
2026-03-01 03:06:00
The day-to-day experience of a physician-in-training is difficult to understand and digest for outsiders. After years in medicine, I have found it on occasion quite hard to describe life as a resident or fellow to those in other occupations. (Admittedly, this is not a one-way phenomenon: those in other career paths will often have a hard time getting me to grasp what they go through.)
There are particular defining moments along this long and winding journey that --- for better or for worse --- stick with you, occasionally bubbling up to front of mind involuntarily on the walk home from work. Sometimes these memories come up with no particular trigger or for no apparent reason. Sometimes, they are positive, like warm feelings of comraderie among teammates, or the satisfaction of a job well done on a long overnight call. But sometimes, like the one I am about to describe, they are memories of those moments in the hospital marked by powerlessness and the guilt and shame of not being able to help the person in front of you. And I believe these moments, accumulated over years, amount to some form of trauma unique to a career in medicine.
Internal medicine residency is a whirlwind. You start out as an intern, pulling 28 hour calls on general medicine admitting patients with a mix of run-of-the-mill emphysema or heart failure, sprinkled in with the occasional exciting zebra case --- perhaps some rare infection (monkeypox?) or immune dysregulation. As you rise in seniority, you quickly move into a team-leadership role as a junior, caring for dozens of patients at a time and managing residents and students. At MGH, senior residents adopt even higher-level roles, overseeing hospital operations by directing admissions from the emergency room and guiding transfers to the intensive care unit. One role of the senior resident is to carry the Code Pager, a beeper that squawks whenever someone in the hospital acutely declines (via a rapid response) or experiences a cardiac arrest (Code Blue).
"Running a code" --- leading a team through a cardiac arrest --- felt like one of those crowning experiences for senior residents, a sign that you've made it as a real doctor. But it was not something I looked forward to. Throughout all of residency, as I grew comfortable making decisions and leading teams, I still viewed leading a Code as something out of reach, something terrifying and difficult, something I'd never be ready for, regardless of the countless times I practiced in the sim lab. The Code Pager was a hot potato, and my anxiety spiked every time it came around to me when I became a senior. Some of my co-residents told me that it was not unusual for some residents to graduate without ever having the Code Pager go off on their shift. Secretly, I hoped that would be the case for me.
But one night at 3am the Code found me while I was on call. The trill of the beeper shook me from the patient note I was writing, and my heart sank as I read the dim text: "Code Blue, Lunder Building". The other residents in the call suite stood up. We were on our way.
Like many other hospitals, MGH is an odd amalgamation of old and new buildings glued together. To get from one end of the hospital to the other could take 5 minutes or more, especially after accounting for the elevator ride. During the entire 5-minute jog from our call room to the Lunder building I found myself wishing to get paged again, "Code Cancelled, false alarm", as sometimes happens. But it did not. When my troupe arrived huffing and puffing at the bedside, I found myself facing a young 20-something-year old man, unconscious in bed, nurses panicking. He had lost his pulse.
I remember that moment very clearly. I stood at the side of his bed in a panic for what felt to be an eternity but probably was only 5 seconds, until my co-resident said "Hey, do you want to start some meds?". That kicked me into gear, and I assumed my position at the foot of the bed. I pulled out my phone and started the ACLS app, barked orders to start compressions, and the chaos of the Code Blue began.
A Code is not something easily described, and not often portrayed accurately on medical shows. It's what I would call "organized chaos" most of the time. The patient's room is swarmed by nurses, interns/residents, respiratory therapy, among many others. One of the first things I learned to do is to clear the room, so I yelled for everyone who didn't need to be there to please leave. During a code, we run through the ABC's of cardiac arrest, ensuring prompt initiation of compressions and assessing the airway. The senior stands at the foot of the bed, makes sure that someone's doing adequate compressions, someone's starting access, and that meds are given at the appropriate intervals. Despite the initial chaos of getting everyone set up, perhaps what's most unnerving is the quiet that typically follows. 5 minutes into a Code, after compressions are started and meds are given, and after everyone starts to try to figure out what the hell's going on and why this kid is arresting, there is an awkward period of not being able to do anything until the couple minutes are up for the next pulse check and the next round of epi.
Such was the case here. 15 minutes in, after several rounds of me announcing "Pause compressions, pulse check. No pulse, resume compressions" I was running out of options. We had given multiple rounds of ACLS meds and continuously given high-quality CPR. I looked around and asked if anybody had any other thoughts. We placed several calls to ECMO to consider life-support, but because of this patient's medical history he was declined. Occasionally, one of the other residents would yell into the room the results of some labs, or some additional piece of medical history that they managed to dig up in the patient's charts. Nothing changed. After 10 more minutes, I started grasping at straws. Should we give this kid tPA? Could this have been a PE? No, said another resident. He's had a stroke before, tPA is contraindicated.
At one point, during a pulse check while I was assessing the rhythm, I thought I saw a few beats of ventricular tachycardia, a shockable rhythm. I remember frantically asking a co-resident, "Hey, is that VT? Should we shock him?" He said "I can't really tell, maybe we should try." But as soon as he said that, the rhythm degenerated into asystole, and we continued with ACLS as we were doing.
There comes a time in every Code that lasts this long, maybe 20-30 minutes into chest compressions, when nurses and residents start giving each other "the look". This is the look of futility. It's the look that quietly says, "I don't think we're going to save this patient, this has been going on for a while." Half an hour into this Code, I could tell people were starting to give each other knowing glances. I ignored them. This guy was only 20 years old. We had to save him.
But minutes later, nothing changed. His labs were getting worse. The attending, who had been standing by me observing the event, finally said "Hey, maybe we should wrap things up." That's when I knew: my first --- and only --- Code Blue was going to end with the patient dying. I announced to the room, "Let's do 2 more rounds of good compressions. If anybody has any thoughts on other things to try, please let me know, otherwise we will discontinue CPR after 2 more rounds." The room remained silent, with only the sounds of compressions (by this point, the LUCAS device was delivering the compressions mechanically), and my occasional commands to "Pause compressions for a pulse check. No pulse, still asystole, resume compressions."
In the end, the inevitable happened. This young patient, whose name I didn't even know, did not regain a pulse. So quietly, we discontinued CPR. A moment of silence, and the room cleared.
The night went on. My shift did not end until 8am. In that period, I held a debrief session with the nurses and physicians involved in the Code. Some were familiar with the patient and shared a few memories. Some cried. Many expressed gratitude for our tremendous efforts in the end. Sometimes, cardiac arrests are not unexpected, especially if the patient is old, sick, with known cardiac disease, and had been declining. It was not the case here. This was a young man, who had been improving after a lengthy hospital admission. Nobody knew why his heart stopped that night. His passing was a surprise to everyone.
The rest of the night was a whirlwind. I returned to the on call suite, where I continued to take overnight medicine consults and review new admissions with interns. The hospital doesn't stop after a Code Blue.
When I stepped out into the brisk morning air at 8am, I felt something had changed. Despite usually being exhausted after a shift, I could not sleep. I stayed outside and went for an hour long walk.
In the weeks that followed, I had nightmares about the Code. I dreamed of the Code Pager going off. Sometimes in my dreams, the patient would survive. Whenever this happened I would wake with the crushing realization that no, I did not save the patient. He did not live.
I have since replayed that night in my head more times than I can count. I sought more debriefing sessions with my colleagues and my attendings after that event. Should I have pushed for tPA? Was it VT that I saw in those brief seconds during the pulse check? Was there something I missed that could have led his heart to start pumping again?
The debriefs always go something like this. He did not die because of anything you did or didn't do. When a patient's heart stops, he is already dead. Your job then is to simply give the heart the slimmest chance of being resuscitated. No, you could not have done anything more for him. It was a well-run code. You did everything right and stuck with the algorithm.
It's now been over three years since that fateful night. Moments like this one stick with me. Partly it's because of the sense of responsibility physicians have over their patients. We invariably want to do right by our patients and to improve outcomes, and in cases like these, poor outcomes trigger our natural tendency to look back and see what we did wrong. Partly it's because of the feeling of frustration and helplessness, of not being able to change the trajectory of a heart stopping, of still not knowing precisely what happened in all that chaos.
Sometimes, on days like today, when the winter cold is letting up into the springtime sun, I take a walk in the nearby park. Sometimes, like today, these memories resurface out of the blue. I spiral a little, imagining how things might have been different if I got to the room a minute sooner, or tried shocking his heart, or had the pharmacy prep the tPA. It takes me a while to run through the debrief sessions I had afterward, for me to settle down again and take a deep breath knowing I did all I could with what I knew in that chaotic half hour.
There's a growing graveyard of other memories. Patients not getting better despite best efforts. Patients dying for reasons outside of our control. And this graveyard will grow over the course of a lifelong career. It's no wonder that physicians become desensitized to this stuff; we have to, in order to move on and continue to deliver good care.
There's an irony in the privilege to be a physician, that the elation of making a positive difference must come with the burden of death and loss. But in medicine, you don't get to keep the privilege without also bearing the weight. The job is to learn to carry both.
2026-03-01 03:06:00
I.
Four years and five days ago, on Feb. 23, 2022, Yochai Gal asked me if I’d like to be a moderator on his NSR Discord server. After some hesitation, I agreed. The next day, Russia invaded Ukraine. Over the next four years, I deepened my involvement with the NSR server as the world plunged deeper into crisis.
This past month, Discord's upcoming ID requirements sparked renewed interest in Discord alternatives. I said I might set up a Zulip instance, but I hesitated. Did I want to recreate the NSR server, or was this an opportunity to create a new community? Early this morning, the US and Israel attacked Iran.
In May, I wrote, "The horrors of World War I and World War II are back. We need damning, realistic art that exposes reality and rouses action now more than ever." That has only become more true. But just above that, I wrote:
World War I was not an adventure. Remarque responded by writing about what the war was; Tolkien responded by writing about what the war wasn't. Fantasy has been about what the modern world is not ever since.
It's healthy, I think, to wish the world was different. It's healthy to play games with your friends. It's okay to pretend the world is simpler than it is for a little while. It's okay to have fun.
But as an artist, I can't help but think to myself: do I want to be more like Tolkien or more like Remarque? And I don't have a clear answer.
In January, I released my scenario game Lull Astir, a socially realistic (Remarque-ian?) take on the late medieval period typically treated as fantasy (Tolkienian). In November, after describing Lull Astir, I wrote:
I don't know yet if I want to build a new community around "Dramatic Matrix Games" or whatever you want to call this. I don't know if I want to create a new movement with a new three-letter-initialism.
But I think, whatever I do, I want to inspire people to express themselves artistically through conversation games. And I want to build a community that isn't centered around my own work in that field so much as it is about inspiring everyone to strive for more with what they make.
II.
Currently, there is a bundle running on Itch.io titled No ICE in Minnesota. For a $10 donation to the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, one can download 1,439 digital products, including video games as well as tabletop games.
Taking a look at the tabletop games included, a few take the "-punk" approach to political commentary, imagining a world in which a handful of extraordinary individuals battle the powers that be (FIST, ECO MOFOS!!). A few are more blunt about it (Punch A F****** Nazi).
But most games in the bundle make little if any comment on the political crisis. And I can't help but notice that the response to the ICE assault on Minneapolis among game designers takes the form of a bundle of existing games and not a game jam encouraging new work. Where is our artistic response to this situation, not just in how we sell our games but in the games themselves?
Some will point out that this is a problem across the arts, and not just in games, and that's true. I focus on games because I'm a game designer. Others will argue that the role of tabletop games is not to comment on politics but to contrast them or provide a distraction from them. Certainly that's the role they play for some, and for me too at times. Everyone needs a break now and then.
But as I said in the quote above, I think there is room to strive for more. I'm writing this post to gauge interest and see how many people agree with me.
III.
This post is titled "For a new social realism in games." Earlier, I described Lull Astir as a "socially realistic" game. What do I mean by social realism?
The Wikipedia article is a start: "Social realism is work... that aims to draw attention to the real socio-political conditions of the working class as a means to critique the power structures behind these conditions." The article continues:
Social realism should not be confused with socialist realism, the official Soviet art form that was institutionalized by Joseph Stalin in 1934 and was later adopted by allied Communist parties worldwide. It is also different from realism as it not only presents conditions of the poor, but does so by conveying the tensions between two opposing forces, such as between farmers and their feudal lord. [Emphasis mine]
This point I've emphasized, conveying the tensions between social forces (or, more precisely, social classes), is critical to my conception of social realism and essential to what I tried to do with Lull Astir for the late-medieval period.
Lull Astir is loosely based on the English peasants' revolt of 1381. Its characters embody the early strivings of the peasantry and nascent bourgeoisie for democracy in opposition to a decaying feudal order.
Central to the scenario is Abbot Eoin, a monk who wants nothing to do with politics, suddenly finding himself at the center of a major political crisis.
At first, I thought scenario games (also known as social matrix games) are uniquely suited to socially realistic tabletop games. Perhaps they are! Instead of the traditional role-playing game divide between players inhabiting a single character and a GM controlling the world, scenario games provide all players with equal authority to tell a story about multiple competing interests.
But I think there is plenty of room for exploration of socially realistic RPGs with the traditional divide. Last week, I was delighted to see Chris McDowall's stream of Gallows Corner, a historical RPG based on the same period as Lull Astir in which players play as ordinary people organizing the peasants' revolt. I am now watching the development of Gallows Corner with great interest.
IV.
You might have noticed, however, that neither Lull Astir nor Gallows Corner deals with the class conflict present in the modern world. This is what I am looking to address in future projects, and if you're a game designer, you can consider this post an invitation to do it alongside me.
Building a community or an artistic movement around an idea like this is going to be a difficult process, I think. I don't think I can do it without developing better examples myself of what sort of game I think we can achieve.
But I didn't want to sit around and wait until I finish something that meets the new standards I'm setting out for myself. I want to start a conversation about what I think is an urgent need for socially realistic games.
Politics, of course, is no substitute for art. In a previous blog post, I quoted my own pitch for the first Lull Astir players:
[Lull Astir is] the culmination of six or seven months of intense creative introspection via hundreds of pages of handwritten notes. It’s very personal to me in a way that nothing else I’ve run has ever been, but at the same time I hope it speaks to something universal about the times we’re living in.
In other words, I didn't simply set out to make a political game and make it. I had to develop a feel for it in my heart and in my bones.
Again, this is going to take time. If you're reading this and you agree with me and you want to make games like this, then I'm not expecting you to make this sort of game tomorrow. But I want you to start thinking and feeling about it.
V.
I have no idea what sort of response this post will get. For all I know it will fall on deaf ears, or I'll be ridiculed for thinking about games when I should be thinking about politics or vice-versa. Maybe no one will read it.
But if you did read it, thank you for making it this far. And I hope you'll tell me what you think in the thread I'm about to make for it in the #blog-posts channel of the NSR Cauldron Discord server — still my home on the internet, for now.
2026-03-01 00:39:00
[This content is likely unsuitable for human consumption]
Welp. Wake up; government commits to another illegal and imperialistic war in the middle east.
As a disabled veteran of the previous illegal and imperialistic wars, my shame and disappointment are immeasurable.
At least they used to have the integrity to lie to our faces. Now they don't even pretend to be the good guys.
I recently intercepted a communication from the lizard people in charge, it roughly translates to:
"We must sacrifice more American lives on the altar of "freedom" [read imperialism].
We are collecting more taxes to fund our military industrial complex and pedophilic compound parties.
We must have more blood for the dark lord's ascension.
You cannot stop us.
Surrender autonomy immediately"
My experience tells me:
Just a few weeks ago they attempted to change the rules of veteran disability payments to make their rating, and therefore access to benefits, tied to how much they suffer with medication instead of how much they suffer if they had no medication. A scheme to rip money away from those that sacrificed nearly everything for the constitution and it's people. This is demon shit. Full mask off, goblin mode.
They reversed their decision within two days because veterans went ballistic on them. I am not sure why they want to poke that bear. Veterans are trained. A lot of us are insane. Nuff said.
Impeach this criminal immediately.
Enough is enough.
Call your senator. Get in the street with a sign. Refuse to participate in the corpo capitalist machine that allows this to happen.
Ensure that you are registered to vote, and have any number of documents possibly required to vote. Then ensure you are registered again; they are purging voters and limiting access to documentation acquisition. Even if the SAVE act fails to pass the Senate [stripping voting rights from millions of Americans] they will continue to exhaust every tool in their belt to disenfranchise voters. Never assume you'll be protected. Protect yourself.
This country has betrayed our sacrifices at every opportunity. It is far past time for the people to unite and say no.
2026-03-01 00:27:00
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