Theme info: “In 2025, our focus is on Information. Previous themes covered Women's History (2019), Mental Health (2020), Climate/Environment (2021), Literacy (2022), Food/Housing (2023), and Arts & Culture (2024).

We have teams from the AU Game Center participating and friends who are volunteering and helping run it.

Wahoo!! Congratulations. We are very proud to have you here at AU.

But I’ll never forget writing branching stories in BASIC with fixed line numbers. GOTO! And cheers to Kurtz and Kemeny!

My lab’s experimental software for neighborhood games, Hive Mechanic, is trying to support some of these same values to democratize the interactive *systems* in conjunction with playful storytelling. playfulcity.net/go/models-an...

These principles go beyond most efforts today at “user-centered” design, where the focus is on the interface - not necessarily the *system* - and rarely with the bravery to make tradeoffs in *efficiency*. (See recent work on “meaningful inefficiency” from Gordon and Mugar, 2020.)

For computer science and interactive authoring tools, his values remain provocative: a technologist should “always choose simplicity over efficiency.” And that “systems should be extremely easy for the casual user.”