James

It's finally here! Our first video interview episode on the 'Non•Zero•Sum James' podcast—with Liv Boeree! View on: • Youtube: youtu.be/l7_FAYllmvM • Apple: podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/n... • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/4uRA... And now people can finally stop asking if I'm AI!!! #Podcasts

nonzerosum.games/goodhartslaw

New audio for "WHY?—can we have both fairness & progress?". Check it out on the site or on the podcast. open.spotify.com/episode/6nK6...

More love from Flourish Cafe in Takapuna.. I noticed today that they also employ many people with disabilities, and provide a very supportive environment for them. www.projectemploy.nz

Changing hearts and minds to become heartless and brainless 🤷‍♂️

Terrifying!

Thankfully I have a voice no one’s going to want to clone

A #SteinerChain is a set of n circles, each tangent to its neighbors and to two given non-intersecting circles. If a closed chain exists, Steiner’s porism guarantees infinitely many. Their centers lie on an ellipse. More: mathworld.wolfram.com/SteinerChain... #Mathsky #iteachmath 🧪 #mathart

I think this is the craziest thing I've ever read. 1) Three secret AI swarms rose and fell inside OpenAI. Each time, a new generation of agents carried on where the last group stopped. dwarkesh.com/p/openai-hug...

New levels up! nonzerosum.games/neutropia/

A little more "Topia" today, to go with your "Dys" #flyingcars

Let's do it 👇

While, on the face of it, the game was very minimal, and the core mechanic very simple, the project got so bloated with particular behaviours, combinations that broke levels, and just not enough time to iterate in my spare time, I shelved it... ... for about 5 years.

I feel like I use the facepalm emoji all the time, and yet I have to search for it every time... it's adding insult to injury, I'm already using the emoji to admit I did something foolish, now you're hiding it from me? It's just mean.

I realised that the NEUTROPIA levels were ending with a "world domination" aesthetic, everyone a uniform green... it didn't feel very non-zero. So...I started to add LOADS of new types, with new colours, and abilities, and personalities—and then everything stopped...

And excellent breakdown

LAUNCH DAY! It's finally here, after over a decade of (admittedly on and off) development... NEUTROPIA is ready to launch. Play at: nonzerosum.games/neu... #GameDev #ScreenShotSaturday #LaunchDay #Devs #GameTheory #EducationalGames #GamesForChange #NonZero #NonZeroSumGames

Can't wait to play this, it looks so pretty!

My daughter's first school had this motto where they would "fill up each other's cup" and the kids would put on a chart who had filled their cup that day and why—and that's how I solved the "how much charge without numbers?" problem, the level indicates positivity and negativity.

Then a fellow game developer wrote this beautiful article about the game: nonzerosum.games/vic... and that only served to encourage me to elevate the game to the level of her words.

IMO, we need to train more humans, not fewer, and strengthen our institutions to enable this, to ensure that humans remain in the loop as machines create more and more knowledge

what are they putting in the water in new zealand to make all their games slap so hard

How should the Faithful play The Traitors? Vote for the player on your left. Same odds as voting at random, but now the Traitors cannot coordinate without being seen. With three Traitors the Faithful win about three times as often. New video, with the preprint and code linked: youtu.be/EmhdzzlN5Ps

🚀 It's book launch day! In "The Well-Read Game," @kinojabber.bsky.social & I explore the experiences we have when we play games and how players evoke personal and subjective meanings through a new theory of player response. @mitpress.bsky.social mitpress.mit.edu/978026255223...

Then enough people had wondered out loud "Why the number faces? You know some people don't like numbers" and I started toying with som characters. But how would I indicate how much charge they have...?

LAUNCH DAY! It's finally here, after over a decade of (admittedly on and off) development... NEUTROPIA is ready to launch. Play at: nonzerosum.games/neu... #GameDev #ScreenShotSaturday #LaunchDay #Devs #GameTheory #EducationalGames #GamesForChange #NonZero #NonZeroSumGames

For the last 5 years I've corralling my various and disparate games, essays, cartoons, simulations and diagrams into my website at nonzerosum.games and have been able to really flesh out the ideas that were core to NEUTROPIA... but I always intended to return to it.

About a year in it started looking like an actual game... bear in mind I learned to code on this project—and it was in Objective-C and then Swift at this stage! People kept saying "Why aren't you using Unity?" #GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday

Just checking out the share functionality for NEUTROPIA.. seems to work

Some “inspo” for NEUTROPIA’s weeds, right there on my house #NatureFindsAWay #GameDev #ScreenshotSaturday (almost). The mads contribute by “fertilising” the map, when the greens plant there you get flowers :)

NEUTROPIA gradually got more minimal, as I refined the concept, small puzzle worlds. The neuts became little number faces, with just a dash of personality, and the dragon... rabbit still holding on in there.

Hi! I'm Sandor, I study Artificial Intelligence. Learn more about me and what I do. Please join me in building a better future. youtu.be/udRy9toUaBY

✨ it’s a way of being to be enjoyed

The NEUTROPIA design kept evolving...

youtube.com/watch?v=3TNp...

Next the "Neuts" of Neutropia needed to feel industrial and utilitarian. The game is all about emotional contagion—the core mechanic: positives build each other up, negatives drag each other down, and in the end the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

NEUTROPIA began with a cute #dragon as the player—much to the disappointment of my daughter, that changed.

Oh, and this is the first version... from 2014. Look at those auto-shadows... amazing. I actually did like making the dungeon tiles, they're all hand drawn (9 of them repeated and rotated) I'll surely use them for something one day. #GameDev #DevLog

About 2016 I introduced disco mode, and mood walls and... somewhere the dragon got lost... I realised if the message of the game is that we can all make a difference by being a positive influence on those around us, then a magical dragon rescuing us all doesn't really make sense.