Matthew Guzdial

for as long as I've been in the game industry - and probably well before - one of the greatest barriers to development has been men in leadership positions who don't know what they want and can't articulate it to the people they're in charge of

In the last year, No More Robots has funded + is currently funding a dozen games, and has paid numerous devs to make prototypes happen for free But obviously, getting press is absolutely impossible for us, because only doom and gloom gets clicks

In partnership with MIGS, we're offering 6 professional developers from marginalized gender identities tickets. Win a chance to attend talks and use the meeting matchmaking system for free, plus a boxed lunch both days! Raffle closes on Nov 3 11:59PM EST. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Pleased to announce that my silly TikToks about AI are now officially *major award winning* silly TikToks about AI. :) Thanks to @scicommexcellence.nationalacademies.org for this award but also for helping legitimize/incentivize science communication! www.nationalacademies.org/news/nationa...

NEW: I spoke with current and former EA employees to understand how the latest layoff round played out and the realities of daily life at the U.S. publisher. The short version? EA is controlled by an executive class that "cannot fail, only be failed." Workers, then, will always pay the price.

Mass Effect was my ultimate white whale, my all-time dream project. For the last couple years I'd been in discussion w/ BioWare & EA to take on the project & as part of that I wrote close to 20 minutes of music to explore where the franchise can go next, may as well share it!

Looking for game devs who have been directly inspired by anything BioWare for my next video. I suspect the public likely doesn’t quite realize the extent of their influence on the industry, so I’d really like to highlight that. If you are one such game devs, pls reply to this post!

Not the top Steam review of Dressmaker making me cry this morning!

I'm sure it's good that over the past several days I have seen multiple vibecoding people say their individual versions of "yeah this is like playing a slot machine for me and I find it hard to stop and I love that actually"

The first edition of Roll For Innovation, my bi-weekly(ish) newsletter is now available! Session Zero provides a grounding and tried to explain the why of the thing. I'd love if you gave it a read and maybe a subscribe <3 roll4innovation.ghost.io/session-zero/

New office...new alumni game collection! Are you an @rittigers.bsky.social alumni and shipped a game? We want to celebrate your accomplishments. DM or email to igm@rit.edu for info. Thx Alex P., Daijya R. Bel C. and William T. for getting us get started! Let's fill this window!

ICLR 2027 organizers appear to have not desk rejected anything, as I just had to "review" a paper made up of exclusively bullet points with 5 references.

We are hiring!! "Artificial intelligence, broadly construed. This includes embodied AI and robotics, machine learning and the systems that support it, and AI developed for problems in science, engineering, medicine, education, and society." jobs.wisc.edu/jobs/assista...

Fledgling indie publisher Aggro Crab is over generative AI: "Show me your dogshit MS Paint drawing of your vision"

The Dept. of Computing Science at the Univ. of Alberta is hiring for two tenure-track positions this year. Please spread the word: - Computer Systems for AI and High-Performance Computing: iaejup.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid... - AI for Health: iaejup.fa.ocs.oraclecloud.com/hcmUI/Candid...

Christopher Wulf, the senior business development manager at narrative games publisher Fellow Traveller, is headed to Edmonton this week! Come grab your insights in the city known for expansive narrative-based games from the publishers behind so many hit games.

For Friday crowd: CMU Press has formally announced a new series of *peer-reviewed* tabletop games, co-edited by myself & CMU media librarian Ashley Werlinich. We have a call out for GAME SUBMISSIONS for a new anthology series called Promptuary. First volume's theme is Strange Worlds / Anthropocene!

The line-up of our 2026 keynote speakers is available! Check them out at: sites.google.com/view/aiide20...

For those not following Mike Cook’s public talk series you’re missing some fantastic stuff! Last year at AIIDE we got “games are generators” and today we got “cities are generators”. The Mike Cook fandom is abuzz with what might be revealed to be a generator next.

Roguelike Celebration 2026 is now happening! Please pick up a pay-what-you're-able ticket at ti.to/roguelike-celebration/roguelike-celebration-2026 and join us in our custom event space for the first of two days of many fun and interesting talks!

Show goes live on YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2NR...) and the playable ASCII convention center (chat.roguelike.club) imminently, I'm on in exactly one hour!

I'm giving a talk on Sunday about push your luck games. It's a bit of a design exploration that I think will go to some interesting and unexpected places

Excited to let folks know that I'll be giving an opening keynote at next weekend's Game Discovery Exhibition conference. Locals, come hear me talk about emergent, embodied, creaturely game design! www.interactiveartsalberta.org/gdxconference

To sound cool in a Brazilian Airport, mention that you are going to BH (pronounced beh-ah-GA, the acronym for Belo Horizonte ;). More tips on where to stay, eat and have fun are up in the Travel and Accommodations page: sites.google.com/view/aiide20...

There is a WILD collection of talks by incredible people across the weekend - this is not a conference about roguelikes as much as it is a conference about a very particular kind of good technology/art/games weirdness, and you absolutely will love it. Schedule: www.roguelike.club/event2026.html

An online community dedicated to supporting and tracking videogame reverse engineering projects has wound down following a recent influx of AI-created decompilations (decomps). Its organiser claims that the recent buzz around AI decomp projects has "warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game."

great question thank you for asking. all of the operators are kissing right off-screen, but they stop when they're in the camera frustrum, out of respect for the workplace. to learn more please play Sherlock Holmes versus Arsène Lupin

Kenney Shape is now FREE! (and it'll remain free, forever) ✨ Previously a paid tool, I'm releasing it as a gift to the community. Today's update will be the final one, with no further updates planned. That way I can focus on new software & projects! kenney.itch.io/kenney-shape

you know what day it is

Thinking still more about the AI booster discourse that tries to undermine critical work on the topic by saying "They don't even use it, how can they possibly know what they're talking about." >>

I find the argument that you soon won't be able to avoid genAI in games utterly unconvincing it's predicated on the idea that genAI is, or will be, a shortcut to higher quality (rather than a form of corner cutting that remains present in the final product) and it ignores why people make stuff

Curious on when your paper will be presented? Check out the AIIDE 2026 schedule! sites.google.com/view/aiide20...

New: I pulled the Character ai bankruptcy documents. They show: - They were spending $14 million/month on compute alone at a time their revenue was around ~$1 million/month - Currently losing $9 million a month - They admitted they enshittified & that it didnt work www.404media.co/character-ai...

The future is in the hardware that people can actually buy.

This Columbo Day, revisit the Prisoner's Dilemma episode that @matthewguz.bsky.social and @nictringali.bsky.social did on two Falk/McGoohan collabs, and then a third one my mother insisted we watch to "get it out of our system." sites.libsyn.com/547902/bonus...

3 hours of teaching and 5 hours of meetings today. Theres a tumbleweed where my brain should be.

Harvard just dropped a study AI productivity in software engineering and it found the average increase in productivity from using Claude code is.....zero and for exactly the reasons you'd think fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf

Welcome back Google Stadia! This time people will want you for sure.

I've been given the honor of giving the closing talk at this year's #Roguelike Celebration @roguelike.club, joining a stellar speaker lineup. I'd share my talk's title, but it would go over bsky's character limit! Check out the full program: www.roguelike.club/event2026.html

Come work with us! The Dyson School of Design Engineering at @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social is hiring for an Assistant Professor in Fair and Responsible AI. www.nature.com/naturecareer...

Interested in learning more about cooperatives or worker centric business models but not with a studio? Check out the upcoming Prairie Winter Studio Jam!

Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.

I'm excited to share Erik Lintunen's work! Mastering Atari 2600 Games with Discovered Options We have a general-purpose option-discovery method that works w/ high-dimensional observations, tabula rasa, using a single stream of experience! It outperforms DreamerV3, Rainbow, and IQN! 1/9

AI is now the biggest investment in all of US history as a percentage of GDP. Datacenter construction is up, all other construction is down. "AI Is Squeezing Out the Rest of the Stock Market," reported WSJ 2 days ago. We basically bet the whole economy on the most optimistic visions panning out.