Probably a good time to reveal my Mastodon form:
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Knives and Paintbrushes
@knifeandbrush
Making tiny, beautiful models of brighter possible futures. We make, research and think about games, AI and creativity. 
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If needed, you can check my:
🐘 Mastodon, that I don't use yet but might in the future peoplemaking.games/@pyrofoux
🐝 Cohost, to read my game design thoughts and experiments, in avant-première
cohost.org/pyrofoux
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🎥NOW ONLINE 🎥
SUPER IS HOT – Designing Games By Breaking and Combining Others (A MAZE./Berlin 2022)
A design talk where I detail how making cursed mashups will make you a better game designer.
↘️↘️↘️
youtube.com/watch?v=m74ZzK
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Excited to announce that 's and I's paper "The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring" has won a Best Paper Award !
I'm so proud of this collaboration, and can't wait to do more work like this!
fdg2022.org/conference-bes
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New Talk - Optimists At Heart: Why Do We Research Game AI?
What motivates Game AI researchers? What hidden motivations drive our work? And what big external forces might be affecting them?
A brief 15 min summary of my vision paper at IEEE CoG 2022.
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Excited to share this piece on the archaeology and history of Elden Ring! I was very glad to get the opportunity to write about the political implications of lore in the game.
Thanks to and for chatting with me.
#archaeogaming #FromSoftware
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If you're after a break from the recent barrage of game news, we have a stellar piece up today investigating how Elden Ring makes archaeologists of its players - by the excellent @florencesn ag.hyperxgaming.com/article/12843/ #ELDENRING
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You think playing Elden Ring is hard? Try recording it archaeologically!
That’s what me and @mtrc did in our paper ‘The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring’
arxiv.org/pdf/2204.10949
#archaeogaming
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arxiv.org/pdf/2204.10949
#archaeogaming
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Huge fan of ’s Super Is Hot philosophy of game-making being a collective act born of a community ecosystem. Can’t think why. 🤔😉
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Hey. Have you heard which game got nominated at , next to NORCO and Sable? It's...
SUPER IS HOT, THE RULE-BREAKING PUZZLE FPS
🕹 pyrofoux.itch.io/super-is-hot
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What can AI do for game design? How can it go wrong, and how can we do it better? Learn about all of this and more from and in their talk, Choose Your Own Misadventure: AI-Powered Futures for Game Design, now available on YouTube!
📺 youtube.com/watch?v=qYxRTo
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Since the start of my PhD working on , the most common question I got asked was "Can I download this and have it make games at home?"
Happy to report, after ten years, the answer is now: yes.
✨Announcing: Puck!
possibilityspace.org/blog-puck/
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Absolute top-notch "tap the sign" potential on the closing slide of and 's extremely good talk Choose Your Own Misadventure: the Future of AI for Game Design
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Missed our GDC talk? Good news: our vision for how we could design new types of games with AI (*while* avoiding exploiting people) will be livestreamed for free on Wednesday.
Take your tickets now: uture-for-gamedesign.eventbrite.co.uk
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#WhatAGameDevLooksLike
Greetings, Traveler. I'm Younès, a queer arab indie dev and a creative AI researcher as well. My speciality is inventing new way for games to make you go "I'm not sure what's happening, but I love it."
Be like a telescope: Watch. This. Space. 💫
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It's time to Choose Your Own Misadventure!
and I will be giving our talk at 9:30am on Monday 21st!
We'll be discussing the good, the bad, and the unexpected in games AI...come along to see how the story ends!
🗡️🖌️
tinyurl.com/y4tkkp2k
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Want to know how the AI boom failed to help us make better games and how we could move on from that? Come to our GDC Talk on Monday, it's the first of the day!
🔍schedule.gdconf.com/session/indepe #gdc2022
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Check out Florence's excellent blog post about environmental storytelling and how it relates to the history of real spaces.
"Be careful about leaving skulls near toilets."
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We're delighted to start up our #OneCoolThing post series - where our team members dig deep into something they think is cool, and share!
Here’s an entry from our Story Tech @florencesn Environmental Storytelling from an Archaeological Perspective 
gutefabrik.com/onecoolthing-f
gutefabrik.com/onecoolthing-f4
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It's Creator Day! That means it's a great day to check out things made by some K&P folks:
Younès: pyrofoux.itch.io
Florence: florencesmithnicholls.itch.io
Mads: pyjamads.itch.io
🔪 🖌 <3
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We're really glad to have the opportunity to come and talk at a venue like GDC about important and difficult topics like this, especially amidst the rush of toxic tech stories coming out of games right now. We can't wait to share the talk with you!
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K&P will be at GDC 2022! and are speaking at the Independent Games Summit about AI, the future of games, and the ethical minefields ahead of us. The talk should be available for free after GDC too!
Choose Your Own Misadventure: schedule.gdconf.com/session/indepe
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Just spent a beautiful few hours talking to with the folks, while screensharing their game, Shutter Stroll. A mesmerising photography game with a rich generative philosophy behind it. It rules and Jannik is a delight!
📸jannikboysen.itch.io/shutterstroll
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.’ AIIDE paper about juice and automated game design is up for Best Student Paper! Huge congrats to Mads, and thanks to for alerting me to this. Well done to all the nominees!
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This weekend, I'll be telling you about a unique roguelike which has no author. The hell does that mean? Why is it a Pokémon game? Come to the to find out!
GIF
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We ran some studies that show that generated juice doesn't harm player experience of a game, and can improve it in some circumstances - but that our simple approach has a long way to go before it's competitive with human designers.
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In this paper, we integrated Squeezer - a tool to help designers make juicy effects - with an automated game design. The AGD system generated effects using Squeezer, matching templated recipes to in-game events like pieces being created or destroyed.
github.com/pyjamads/Squee
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But automated game design systems mostly ignore juice - in fact, most automatically designed games don't even have handmade juice. If juice is such a big part of game design, it would be great to get AGD systems to take responsibility for juice themselves.
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Juice is a vital part of game design - it doesn't just make games look nice and feel good to play, it also helps games communicate their intentions more, shape what information the player pays attention to, and impact the overall design.
Further reading: arxiv.org/abs/2011.09201
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This week is presenting his work with on automatically generating juicy effects for games, combining his amazing juice-generating system, Squeezer, with the automated game designer Puck. #aiide21
Paper: knivesandpaintbrushes.org/pdfs/AIIDE-202
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We hope you'll follow and work with us as we explore and create new futures with technology.
You can also follow our members individually:
Florence Smith Nicholls -
Younès Rabii -
Mads Johansen -
Mike Cook -
🗡🖌
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Our name comes from a snippet of the book Hackers, about MIT's model railroad club. You can read more about the origins of our name, why we chose it, and what it signifies, on our site here:
knivesandpaintbrushes.org/about.html
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But we're not just AI researchers! Our members have lots of interests including archaeology, game development, queer theory, interaction design, installation art, narrative design, science communication, and more besides. All of this is part of our work.
knivesandpaintbrushes.org/latest.html
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A lot of our work falls under the label of 'AI research', and so a core value for us is making sure we work to make AI research a better place, and to support the general public in understanding, engaging with and feeling in control of future technology.
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Hello everyone! We're delighted to announce that... we exist! Knives & Paintbrushes is a small group of designers and researchers who work to make tiny, beautiful models of brighter possible futures. Come and find out more about us on our website:
🗡 knivesandpaintbrushes.org 🖌
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