Weird Attention Engines

I’ve been using social media in one form or another for about 25 years at this point, give or take, whether that was Faceparty or LiveJournal or Bebo or… well, you don’t need me to list all the different social media sites that have come and gone over the years, do you? And I’ve had a presence on the internet for even longer. The first site I ever built was a space where I wrote short fiction that I based on the 16-bit animated GIFs of monsters a complete stranger was making. I often wish I could find that site again, just to see what sort of stories I was writing. And I often wonder if that complete stranger knew that the person she/he/they were talking to was 14 year old kid who just wanted people to read his writing.

Social media has taught us to be loud, to always have something to say even if it’s something completely empty. To be quiet on the internet is to cease to exist. Algorithms reward us for constantly making noise. If you take some time away, if your all-important Engagement drops off, then when you return with something to say the platforms say no, sorry, you were quiet for too long. You may have found your voice again, but we won’t allow anyone to hear it.

Every month when I sit down to write this newsletter I wonder if I have anything to say. Am I writing this to communicate something thoughtgul with the people who’ve asked to hear from me, or am I writing this because I know that if I miss a month fewer people will read it when the next one rolls around? It’s impossible to be mentally On all the time, but this is the life I’ve chosen for myself.

On the 21st of March I’ll be attending the preview/opening of Weird Hope Engines, a show put together by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards, and Jamie Sutcliffe. The first exhibition of its kind, the show aims to “explore play as a site of projection, simulation, communal myth-making, distorted temporality, and alternate possibility”. I’ve been writing a game for it that I’ve titled ‘Directive 92A’, a dystopian group journalling game that I’m pitching as Papers Please meets Fahrenheit 451. Here’s the pitch:

In the near future the government has outlawed artistic expression and that collective memory is failing because we remember history through stories. You are a government agent who’s been tasked with correcting the historical record in the form of stories people tell about the world and what happened to get to this point. You can choose to do your job, or you can choose to add new stories to the record to preserve the past that’s being taken from you.

The game explores the power in the things that we say and the way we choose to say them, and asks you to imagine a world were the freedom to speak the truth has been stripped from you. The show will run from March 22nd to May 10th at Bonningon Gallery in Nottingham and also features new games by Laurie O’Connel, Zedeck Siew, and Angela Washko, as well as original displays by Amanda Lee Franck, Tom K Kemp with Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Andrew Walter and Shuyi Zhang. I’m very excited to be a part of it.

The week prior to that, on March 13th, Blood In The Margins launches on Backerkit. To mark the occasion of the 5th anniversary of Wretched & Alone I’m blogging my way through a lot of W&A games on Loot The Room. The second post will go live today, with regular play-throughs appearing throughout the month. I think Blood In The Margins is going to be really good, and I hope you’ll pick it up.

Oh yeah, Rebellion Unplugged finally announced that I’ve been working on the new edition of Tunnels & Trolls for the past 18 months. Which is exciting.

Here are some things I’ve been enjoying recently:

• The new Banks album is just really, really good.
• As is the new Stray From The Path single.
• Here’s my February playlist.
• Sam Richard’s The Still Beating Heart of a Dead God has a cover that makes me want to play DCC and is packed full of great, weird, heartfelt horror.
• I don’t know if it’s accurate to say that I enjoyed Quinn B. Rodriguez’s malaise. but I felt very seen by it.

There’s probably more I should say and include, but I’m still recovering from surgery and my brain is a fog of codeine and discomfort. As always, here is a picture of my cat.

Past Newsletters on Itch

• January/February 2025