Michael R and Ian “Epredator” Hughes get together for a chat about #gaming, #VR, and #technology. We talk about some of our favorite comfort games, how they are procedurally generated, and how the gaming business model has bifurcated between ongoing money grabs and lovingly created indie games.
Comments Off on e530 — Vibe It! – Ready Player Chum
Photo by Kindel Media from Pexels: https://www.pexels.com/photo/white-robot-toy-on-gray-concrete-floor-9026299/
Published 29 September 2025
e530 with Michael and Michael – an AI extravaganza with vibe coding, AI gaming chums, rating LLMs via Infocom games, robots for construction, self assembling space habitats and a whole lot more.
Michael and Michael get things moving this episode with an AI extravaganza while Andy is away. The co hosts start things off with a vibe coding assistant to help you with your QBasic programming needs. Next up, the pair consider a couple of stories dealing with assistants who can help users be more effective in playing games. There is a real Goldilocks zone for the assistant to help the player remain in a state of flow, where the game is neither too easy due to the assistant’s help, nor too frustrating to play. Michael R gives an example of his trying to get to Orc Town to progress in Mines of Moria. Continuing on the theme of AIs playing games, Michael and Michael take a look at TextQuests, where a variety of LLMs take up the challenge of playing Infocom text based games. With all the discussion on AI slop in the news, the article from Computerworld about the mathematical inevitability of hallucinations is particularly timely.
Michael and Michael move from AI to robotics and take a look at the construction bot from Dusty Robotics, which prints out a life size blueprint directly on the floor. Michael M shares a space habitat construction solution from Aurelia that uses magnets to self assemble in orbit. Michael R shares a story about the engineering feat of moving a viking ship without damaging it, which reminded Michael M of the challenge of moving the Cape Hatteras lighthouse. Check out the links below for all the details.
What would your ideal game chum be like? What do you think about the current state of AI chum? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!
These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
e529 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AR glasses & snarky AI wearables, Carrot Weather, Rabbit OS2, shaking to summarize, Doomscrolling and a whole lot more.
Michael, Andy and Michael get things moving this episode with all things AI. After starting with a parody about camera less phones which generate pictures, the team moves to an article about Amazon’s project Jayhawk AR glasses for their drivers. Next up is a new gesture for Firefox users on iOS – the ability to shake to summarize. After an article on AI audio manipulation, Andy and Michael M are reminded of how Denmark is providing a defense against deepfakes by updating copyrights to provide individuals the right to their own appearance and voice.
Following up on a plethora of stories in recent episodes on AI powered wearables, this episode takes on the Futurism article about the Friend pendant. Apparently, this companion has a bit of a snarky personality by design, and that got the co hosts talking about Carrot’s weather application. After mentioning that the Rabbit portable AI device gains a new OS upgrade, the team takes on a couple of game topics, including iPod click wheel game preservation and a Doomscroll game to try.
Would you rather play Doomscroll or just doomscroll manually? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!
These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
Comments Off on e528 — Monstrous Mice & Nano Bananas
ChatGPT 5 generated image of a banana in the midst of an atom cloud generated 31 August 2025
Published 8 September 2025
e528 with Michael, Andy and Michael – stories about AI image editing with Nano Banana, GAN enabled LLM evolution with R-Zero, MentraOS open source smart glasses, automotive software, Making Monsters, Kazeta and a whole lot more.
Michael, Andy and Michael get things rolling with the Nano Banana image editing software from Google. While the generated and altered images are very sophisticated, there are still a few tells that the photos came from AI. An example from the Washington Post article calls out the “AI gibberish” replacement of numbers on the phone keypad – while the replacement of the human in the phone booth with a water buffalo replete with smart ring is ultra realistic. Andy’s ChatGPT generated nano banana is a fun visualization for an atom-sized banana, even though he was “AI-splained” by the chatbot that “a banana at that scale couldn’t exist in any realistic way.” Ha!
The team touches on a couple more AI stories dealing with with the Fast-VLM video captioning model and a generative adversarial network method of self evolving reasoning LLM with R-Zero. Next is a springboard for the MentraOS open source smart glasses operating system that reminds the team of Andy’s experience in 2024 with the Brilliant Labs Monocle.
Then the co-hosts talk about automotive software – and the challenges posed by the need to troubleshoot and correct for the intersection between evolving software and existing hardware. The frequency for software updates for a vehicle, phones and more requires a level of testing and integration that can be very frustrating when things don’t work as expected. Understatement of the year, I’m sure.
Wrapping up the episode are a couple of games – a kickstarter called Making Monsters, Office Job, which has a television sized screen and suitcase sized mouse and Kazeta for cartridge gaming.
What’s been your most frustrating automotive software experience? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!
These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.
