There’s Heart in the Art and the Boat Is Afloat, with Tanya X. Short

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 161.

Tanya X. Short descends to our dunj to talk about her ten years as the Captain of Kitfox Games. We talk about about long-term studio survival, what so-called AI really is, and making systems-driven games with heart—as well as the necessity of a tea-witch in all functional partnerships.
You can find the whole Kitfox Games catalog on their website.
The deadline to apply for the Pixelles Prototype Fund is May 25.
You can also follow Tanya, Kitfox, and Pixelles on Twitter.

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• Here are our conversations of varyingly recent vintage with Santiago Zapata, Star St. Germain, Esther Alter, Chris Hanney, Anita Tung, and Emma Kinema.

• And here’s Emily Short’s Five Strategies for Collaborating with a Machine.

• We didn’t get too deep into Emily M. Bender’s work, but Tanya did make reference to a paper Bender co-authored, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? And this recent interview contains some of Bender’s thoughts on present-day so-called AI.

• The video essay Drew referenced, about humans being neither the artist nor the audience for a lot of current content, is Lily Alexandre’s Everything Is Sludge: Art in the Post-Human Era.

• No one has really written a definitive history of Boyfriend Maker, unfortunately. For a related but largely distinct ethical nightmare, you could check out this other video essay, on Replika.

• We will indeed be looking into One More Multiverse.

• Regrettably, we didn’t get a chance to talk about that Kitfox blog post about messy design—but it’s something worth considering: elegance maybe being over.
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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Whipped Into Shape (feat. Madeleine McQueen)” from Boyfriend Dungeon: Secret Weapons, the DLC addendum to the Boyfriend Dungeon OST, by Marskye.

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