"parallel prolog" sounds pretty erlang-y 🙂

yep, a paper mentions the innovation of a clause having "Head, Guard and Body", all Erlang vocabulary (also the syntax 😄)

Everything comes full circle 😉 https://github.com/rvirding/erlog

Erlang was definitely an inspiration for my own side project (fizz)

Look at that demo! Two floppy disks. 1 MEGAbyte of RAM. And look at Amiga OS, working under equally limited conditions and it doesn’t look that different from the OSes we use today.

This makes me hopeful that somewhere in between the space of retro-computing, where excellent minds use the quirks and specialties of old but well-understood platforms to make incredible things possible and contemporary computing, where so much more computational power is available to so many more people in so many more formats, there is a sweet spot where we can remove the complexity of accumulated cruft in modern hard- and software and we can remove the complexity of workarounds that were necessary on old systems to make things work that seemed architecturally impossible, to build something that is fully understandable by a single mind, works well, and does most of the stuff today’s computers do.

has anyone played braid and/or the witness? did you find it mind expanding? i'm curious

(having never tried either)

I’ve played both and found both pretty interesting

I play a lot of video games in general and both of these games are in a small niche of games that really try to get you thinking. They also tap into what’s great / native about the medium -- e.g. puzzles as constructivist learning devices

I’ve personally never understood why most games focus on things like story, movies / books IMO are way better at linear story telling (I know some games do nonlinear stuff which is more interesting at least / unique to the games medium!)

but neither of his games are “fun” in the traditional sense (I play some of those FPS games that are more couch-relaxation types).

I would say that I found both Braid and The Witness "fun" in the traditional sense of the word, but that's a matter of taste for sure. They're both overwrought labours of love, and they're both worth playing, even just for 30 minutes apiece. They are exemplary at teaching complex system dynamics through interactivity (something very relevant to our community).

As for "mind-expanding" — again, very subjective — I felt that about Braid more than The Witness, but Braid came out at a time when the definition of "game" was much more restrictive than it is now and did a lot to push that definition. (I also have some headcanon about Braid's secret ending actually being about Blow's personal discovery of the concept for Braid and the ramifications thereof in terms of his life and career, and that makes the game more "interesting" to me as a fellow creator, but I digress.)

Much like a good piece of experimental cinema (or psychotropics, or what have you), what you get out of the experience will be colored a lot by what you expect to get out of it, what cultural context you're in, your preexisting familiarity with the thing, and so forth. So you might "get more" out of Journey, or Antichamber, or Passage, or What Remains of Edith Finch, or The Beginner's Guide, if you haven't heard anything about those games but have heard a lot about Blow's games and are just broadly interested in seeing what video games have to offer as a medium for conveying new kinds of narrative / experience.