Dearest You,

At some point in the (potentially deep) past you signed up for that newsletter I pretty much never sent. Well, I'm older now, and wiser (or at the very least more tired), and more admiring of email than ever for its pointed lack of platformy qualities. So, I want to resurrect the idea of writing that newsletter. With, I guess, "news" in it. So here I am, using this newsletter service called Kit, and we shall see.

If you're like "what the hell, Pippin, why do you still have my email address?" then please absolutely don't hesitate to: Unsubscribe. You can also use the link they thoughtfully provided at the bottom of this template. Conversely, if you're like "oh yeah! Pippin!" and want to fire me an email in return, please do: pippin.barr@proton.me!

And if you'd like to hear what I'm up to roughly fortnightly with additional updates if I "release" something, stick around and we'll do this thing.

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For now, a little summary of how things are.

I'm writing a book called Playing the Variation Game, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Game Design which is under contract with The MIT Press. It's about zooming in on a really simple game design exercise of making variations of a simple game (much as I did with Pong among others).

I released a game called As Slow As Possible last week. It's a set of three really slow arcade games where I was trying to explore how that slowness feels in play. (It also includes my first "game soundtrack" in a while, using strudel.cc.)

I started a tiny game I'm tentatively calling Play It By Trust (WhiteSky Blue Super Mario Bros.) last night. It's a videogame take on Yoko Ono's white chess set, with all the palettes on a Super Mario Bros. ROM set to whitesky blue. (There was some discussion about the wisdom of using the colour white here and even less inclination to tangle with making it black, so I chose the very pleasant colour of the sky in the overworld levels instead - a sky blue that looks kind of purple. Brown was also suggested, but I had to draw the line somewhere.)

I found a note I'd written down that just said "half chess," and I'm thinking about making that as well.

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Now we're all caught up I suppose. Catch you next time?

Pippin