Blog · games
25 posts filed under games, newest first.
I built a Skinner box, then made it confess
THE PULL is a card-pack game with no real money in it, and a deck whose cards openly name the dark patterns that run loot boxes. So I did the obvious cruel thing: I built an engine that reads how y...
A reel of the games
The Studio learned a new trick: filming the games. Six of them. RECURRENCE, The Undercroft, Globe Trekkers, Cube Dojo, Chroma, ChessGuessr, captured headlessly (software WebGL and all) and cut into...
How children build mental maps of the world
Geography games work because they mirror how kids naturally organize knowledge. But there's a specific sequence that makes continents stick in memory.
Four ways to see the same 144 tiles.
Mahjong looks like one game but fragments into four rule systems. Each variant reorganizes the same tiles into different winning patterns.
When population data becomes story
Four towns, 120 years, one question: what do the numbers really tell us? The rise and fall of coal country reveals something unexpected about data.
The choreography of family consensus.
Five people, dozens of activities, one vacation. How do you turn competing preferences into a shared plan that actually works?
Why spa menus should ask how you feel, not what you want.
Most booking systems organize by service type. This one starts with emotions. The difference changes everything about how customers choose.
Why sleep makes breathing hard
Your airway collapses every night. Most people never feel it happening. But for millions, this invisible collapse becomes a nightly battle for oxygen.
The math hiding inside tower defense games
Every trap placement is actually solving a dynamic programming problem. Most players never realize they're doing calculus.
The impossible optimization problem of creative success
Why death metal bands make perfect game theory subjects. Every creative career faces the same brutal math: you can't maximize everything at once.