michael-dean-k/

Played video games with my wife tonight. First we played Mario Kart on Switch (and tied). Then we opened the SuperNES emulator and it was really nostalgic. The original Kart (1993?) was nauseating, but also, harder, and more challenging. Feels like they've really simplified games so that young kids are never confused, which sort of takes the fun out of it. Then I played Donkey Kong Country (1994?) from Rareware, and remembered playing the game with my neighbor, JA, back when we were kids. Felt like a solid game, challenging, beat a few levels, and could imagine myself trying to beat it as an adult; though the concept of dedicating any attention to video games (new or old) seems off. Then we played a full game of tennis, and she won. Similar experience (awkward, but hard and challenging). Closed with Yoshi's Island, which is an example of how a game can be explicitly about babies, and yet still have an art style that is beautiful to an adult. After this experience, I guess my sense is that modern Switch games have turned to a kind of brain rot, and abandoning of art/soul for bright colors and attention catching? Can't say for sure. Maybe I'm just an old crank now. In any case, wondering if there's anything I'd gain through returning to old Nintendo games as leisure.

The Darth Vader x hip hop crossover is a good example of fan-led genre breeding that’s about to explode. Something like Star Wars can be bred with, effectively, anything: baseball, jam bands, New York City, whatever. The question is which hybrids can sustain an audience for more than a single short? Will someone build an empire off of an unexpected but perfect hybrid? (I think there’s potential in GTA meets Mario)

"Vibe coding for wordcels" (s/o to David Kiferbaum). Two thoughts here:

1. In the last 30 years, there’s been low overlap between people who could write great prose and people who could write great code. If code becomes easier, then what might great writers build? How might literature push the frontier of something as simple as a retro arcade game?

2. When I go on X, all I see are like “look, I built an entire CITY in one prompt,” and while yes that’s technically amazing, it’s completely different from full stack development & security & all the things you need to know if you want to build an app that can scale to thousands of users. Feels like we’re entering the “software as meme” era, but software architecture is really where the value is. There’s probably a lot of value in teaching writers how to ship software to their audience.

11:30 AM—I used Claude to recreate a video game that my dad, brother and I made in 1995. I changed the logic so that every time you get a diamond, a new monster appears. This makes it get progressively harder within the level.

Inside the Monster Human

Prompt:

“Below are rules for a game. Read them and ask me any questions to clarify implementation before you build it: I'd like to create a game called "Inside the Monster Human." * Each level is a 30x30 grid. Cells can either be white or black (if it's black, characters cannot move onto them). Let's make the level something like a star, with a white center with 5 wings you can go down.* There are 10 diamonds randomly placed around the level. * The character (a hand-drawn red smiley face with a white mouth and eyes) uses the arrow keys to move around the grid and collect diamonds. When the character enters the cell of a diamond, the diamond disappears and displays a sound. *Each level contains monsters that are randomly placed. Every time the character moves one cell, the monsters moves in one cell in random direction. If they hit the character, it plays an "Oh no!" sound, displays a game over screen, and restarts the game. The map starts with 3 monsters. But every time a character gets a diamond, it randomly spawns 1 new diamond and 1 new monster. Display the score.”

11:29 PM—I probably got this idea from Ready Player One, but there’s something interesting about baking my consciousness into a video game. There are two interesting mechanics:

1. The highest scorer unlocks a personal piece of writing. You effectively have to beat me at my own game, making it pretty hard. The allure of the essay is more important than the essay itself (but of course, it needs to be awesome / revelatory).
2. As you play the game, each “coin” could unlock one of thousands of memories. Currently have a list of 300+ memories, sorted by year. The idea is the player gets these shards and slowly pieces together a sense of my life.

If I had this game running, it would be incentive to (a) remember all my memories from the past, and (b) to keep uploading them each year. By doing this, I not only have a non-linear game-based memoir, but my cornerstone memories are now machine-legible and can guide some weird AI experiments.

Bought memorydungeon.com. This isn't really a priority, but I imagine if I slowly jot memories all year, I’ll be able to throw this together one weekend in December.

02:33 PM, ONE DAY LATER—I think I get why footnotes don’t make sense in memoir / personal writing. It can feel like dictionary-brain. I also wonder if something is only footnotes (w/o a main narrative) is it even a footnote? I sense there’s something liberating about recording memories as personal paragraphs that don’t have to fit into a story.

So imagine this game is like a turn-based Pacman (but the ghosts are stupid and replicate out of control) — and so the main character is collecting diamonds, and each one has a year on them, so it’s like “Hm, do I go for 1997, or 2009, or 2021?” And then when you get it, it shows a self-contained paragraph from that year.

I think there’s a word for this: “the fragmented essay.” Honestly, they’re my least favorite sub-genre, but I think they weirdly make sense when you put it inside of Pacman.