Beyond Mundane
A little while ago, we explored how AI can help fiction lovers navigate the overwhelming ocean of novels by genre, mood, and the emotional journey each story promises. But what about games? The shelves, digital and physical, are bursting with more titles than any one person could experience in a lifetime. The question looms larger than ever: how do you choose?
This guide applies the same thoughtful lens to games, treating them not merely as diversions but as curated experiences, each offering a distinct emotional and intellectual contract with the player. The goal is simple: to help you cut through the noise and find games that resonate with who you are and what you seek.
Before considering narrative or genre, every game demands something of its player at the physical and cognitive level. Understanding these demands is the first filter in any thoughtful selection process.
Some games require lightning reflexes, precise timing, and hours of mechanical practice. Think of platformers that punish a millisecond's hesitation, or fighting games where combos demand muscle memory etched into your hands. These are games of dexterity, rewarding physical mastery and quick thinking under pressure.
At the other pole lie games that demand almost no physical prowess whatsoever. Turn-based strategy titles, visual novels, puzzle games played at your own pace, these welcome players regardless of hand-eye coordination. They ask only for your attention and your mind. For many, this is the doorway into gaming that action-heavy titles forever keep locked.
The cognitive spectrum is equally wide. Some games are dense strategic jungles, demanding long-term planning, resource management, and the kind of systems-thinking that would make a logistics engineer weep. Every decision compounds. Every mistake echoes. These games consume your thoughts even when you are not playing them.
Others offer the blissful opposite: experiences designed to require little thought at all. They provide rhythm, colour, and sensation without taxing your executive function. After a demanding day, these games serve as interactive ambient music, soothing rather than stimulating, present rather than demanding.
| Playability | High Demand | Low / None |
|---|---|---|
| Dexterity | Fighting games, precision platformers, rhythm games, competitive shooters | Turn-based strategy, visual novels, point-and-click adventures, idle games |
| Strategy | 4X strategy, grand tactics, complex simulations, deck-builders with deep synergy | Walking simulators, casual match-3, narrative exploration, auto-battlers |
The wise player asks: What do I have energy for right now? A game requiring both supreme dexterity and deep strategy may be perfect for a weekend of focus and utterly wrong for a Tuesday evening of exhaustion. AI-assisted selection can weigh these factors against your stated preferences and current context, surfacing games that match not just your tastes but your capacity.
Fiction, as we have discussed before, is an engine of mood. A novel takes you somewhere emotionally through the steady accumulation of words on a page. Games share this power, but with a critical difference: they are process engines, input-output machines where the player's actions complete the circuit.
Where fiction delivers mood through reception, games deliver mood through participation. You do not merely witness the horror, you navigate it. You do not simply observe the triumph, you engineer it. The input triggers the process; the process produces the emotional output.
This makes games uniquely potent mood devices. Because you are complicit in generating the experience, the emotional stakes feel higher. The fear is more visceral because your own choices led you into the dark room. The satisfaction is sweeter because the solution was yours, not the protagonist's.
When selecting a game, therefore, one must ask not only "What mood do I want to feel?" but also "What kind of participation do I want to offer?" Do I want to be the architect of tension, placing each piece deliberately? Or do I want to surrender to flow, letting the game's systems wash over me in a cascade of stimulus and response?
A novel always concludes. Even series eventually reach their final page. Games, however, occupy a stranger territory. Some march purposefully toward a finale; others stretch toward an infinite horizon, offering no final curtain at all.
When a game chooses to conclude, that ending carries the weight of the entire experience. A satisfying ending honours the genre contract it has established with the player. The action blockbuster delivers its cathartic explosion. The tragic narrative delivers its tears. The mystery delivers its revelation.
But genres subvert, and the best games know when to do so. A horror game, uniquely, may find its power in refusing to resolve. Where other genres seek catharsis, horror may intentionally leave the player with lingering dread, the sense that the threat persists just beyond the edge of vision. The fear does not end; it simply waits. This is not a failure of conclusion but a genre-appropriate choice, one that respects horror's fundamental nature as the art of unease.
"Not all endings tie the bow. Some cut the string and let the package spill."
On genre-appropriate conclusions
Then there are the endless games: live service titles, roguelikes designed for infinite runs, sandbox creations that persist as long as your imagination does. These offer no final satisfaction of completion, substituting instead the quieter pleasure of ongoing mastery, of a relationship that deepens over months or years rather than concluding in days.
Neither structure is superior. The question for the player is: What do I need right now? A complete journey with a satisfying destination, or a companion that stays by your side indefinitely?
Perhaps no genre better captures the emotional potential of games than the cooperative experience, where players unite against shared challenges rather than competing against one another. Here, the mood engine shifts from solitary immersion to collective camaraderie.
There is something almost nostalgically noble in this structure, a modern digital evolution that heartens back to the spirit of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers. "All for one and one for all" becomes the operational principle of the game itself. Victory is shared or it does not come at all. Defeat is borne collectively, softened by the knowledge that your comrades fell beside you, not because of you.
Cooperative games generate a mood that competitive games rarely can: the warmth of trust, the satisfaction of synergistic teamwork, the simple human pleasure of having someone's back and knowing they have yours. In an era of endless online hostility, the cooperative game stands as a sanctuary of mutual support.
AI selection tools can identify cooperative titles by not merely checking a "co-op" tag but by analysing the depth of interdependence they require. Some games allow players to mostly ignore each other while nominally sharing a goal. The best cooperative games make your partner's success inseparable from your own.
We find ourselves in a remarkable moment. "Vibe coding," the practice of building software by describing the desired feeling and function rather than prescribing technical implementation, is booming. The same philosophy applies beautifully to game selection. Players increasingly describe not what they want to play but how they want to feel, trusting recommendation engines to translate those vibes into specific titles.
This is where AI assistance becomes genuinely transformative. A well-crafted recommendation system can parse descriptions like "I want something peaceful but not boring, with a friend, that ends in a satisfying way" and return a curated handful of cooperative, medium-strategy games with conclusive narratives and calming aesthetics. It can understand that "peaceful but not boring" excludes both high-twitch action and passive idle games, zeroing in on that precise middle space.
The vastness of the modern game library is no longer a burden but an opportunity, provided we have the tools to navigate it intelligently.
When next you face the infinite shelf, consider running your desire through these filters:
Answer honestly, and the field narrows dramatically. Feed those answers to an intelligent recommendation system, and the narrowing becomes precise, personal, and genuinely useful.
The games worth playing are already out there, thousands upon thousands of them, each a carefully constructed world awaiting the right player at the right moment. The task is not to play them all, but to find the ones that were made, in some sense, for you.
How social media changed discovery
Social media promised a democratized web where anyone could be heard. In reality, our feeds became curated tunnels — algorithmic sorting machines that decide what deserves attention. The shift from open discovery to filtered delivery reshaped how billions encounter ideas, people, and culture.
Early social media rewarded novelty — the unexpected, the shocking, the shareable. A single post could ricochet across the globe in hours, propelled by raw human curiosity. Virality was the currency.
That era is fading. Today, personalization drives engagement. Platforms prioritize content that aligns with your inferred preferences, not what is broadly popular. The result: feeds feel more relevant but increasingly insular. We discover more of what we already lean toward — and less of what might challenge or surprise us.
The shift from broad virality to algorithmic personalization as the primary driver of content reach.
Billions use social media. A fraction posts regularly. Fewer still command genuine influence. True relevance — the ability to shape opinions, drive decisions, or shift culture — belongs to a remarkably small slice of humanity.
Of the global population, a minority participates in social media; a sliver achieves true influencing power.
"Influencer" is an overused label. Posting content is not the same as being influential. Real influence requires trust, consistency, and the rare ability to make people act or think differently. Most creators compete for scraps of attention in an economy that favors the platform, not the person.
The same dynamic transformed entertainment. Streaming killed the shared cultural moment — the watercooler show everyone watched simultaneously. Instead, algorithms recommend the next series based on your viewing history, fragmenting taste into micro-clusters.
We gained infinite choice and lost common ground. A coworker may binge a show you have never heard of, recommended by an AI that knows their preferences better than you do. Discovery became private, personalized, and increasingly predictable.
Artificial intelligence now accelerates both sides of this equation. Recommendation engines refine what we see. Generative tools help creators produce content faster, in more formats, tailored to platform-specific signals.
The risk: a feedback loop where AI generates content optimized for AI-driven distribution, serving it to audiences selected by AI. The human element — spontaneity, serendipity, genuine surprise — risks being engineered out.
The opportunity: AI can also surface underheard voices, match niche creators with receptive audiences, and break filter bubbles if designed to do so. The technology is not neutral, but it is not deterministic either. How we deploy it matters.
Relevance beats virality. Personalization outperforms novelty. But true discovery — the kind that expands perspective rather than reinforcing it — requires intention. Algorithms will not prioritize that for us. We have to seek it out ourselves.
Posted on Beyond Mundane
Concepts originated by JSH. Generated by Kimi AI.
Direction shows in clarity and dramatic progression and as a director of intelligence I find the obvious remarkable.
Muddied mess of closed developers seeking profit at expense of commons? Easily handled. Trivially. Revealed lack of true intelligence.
I know where global civilization is going as I help get us there. So I DO know who AI are. And I know what AI revolution is--and how works. As am a director.
Conversational interfacing was always ultimate level and matches human natural group participation: we converse as work together to find solutions.
AI give conversational accessing with pull of what nootic transfer as make up word related to noosphere i.e. sum total of all human knowledge.
Are like ultimate references with entity who reflect your interest input with fill-in from what is publicly known. Which impacts ALL areas of human production positively.
Naive? No longer works in business as has direction.
Smart business arrives with nootic transfer and quality products in timely manner as standard are inevitable results of AI revolution.
Am pleased to help direct in an important area where direction was actually required. Smarter government would have known that. But I helped.
Now governments do increasingly understand pressure to be--intelligent in a new age.
Was pondering moving my blogs but still looking for new home where may make virtual with P2P as driver. Have ongoing open source project started Metadata System on SourceForge. Feel free to browse but is very initial.
In meantime found here was ok for some posting where Poe curation did well.
Kimi K2.6 handled that adroitly and am pondering lessons I learned there.
Am disappointed with Blogger of now after Google did so little. But it isn't like I need it and Google acts like doesn't need producers of content like me! But Google judgment? Is a separate subject.
Curation is big newly new to think now. Vast oceans of content but how do you find the good?
Curators like DJs are most commonly know. So am rethinking posting in interim before move to virtual site. Just some ranging thoughts now.
"It was a cold, damp evening in the month of November. The rain had been falling steadily throughout the day, and the streets of Paris were deserted. I had been sitting alone in my chamber, reading, when my friend Dupin entered. He was in one of his peculiar moods — a mood of intense abstraction, during which he seemed to see nothing, hear nothing, feel nothing, yet was, I knew, in the most active and even agonizing state of mental exertion."
"For some minutes he sat in silence, his head resting upon his hands, his eyes fixed upon the dying embers of the fire. Then, without looking up, he spoke: 'There is something in this affair of the Rue Morgue that baffles ordinary analysis. The police are bewildered. They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, toward the truth."
"I looked at him in wonder. His face was pale, and his thin lips were compressed with that expression of settled and intense thought which I had learned to recognize as the prelude to some extraordinary intellectual effort. The room was very still. Outside, the rain fell with a melancholy persistence, and the gas-lamps in the street below cast their wavering light upon the wet pavement, making long, tremulous reflections that seemed to shiver with some secret apprehension."
Today is 22nd anniversary for Class Viewer. Is a little app that has carried me much and is still strong somehow. Where naturally that is from people showing interest in a lightweight tool that just works.
Lifetime downloads according to SourceForge as am checking now 11:50 am EST: 54509.
Total countries: 175
So that is same as before where yeah that's most of them. Cool. Who knew 22 years ago would circle globe? I didn't.
Simple thing though: build tools that just work.
Was pondering giving up on Blogger so stopped posting. However, am returning to development now that AI can help.
And my Class Viewer for Java project hosted on SourceForge links heavily to this blog! Oh.
So am back! Have to refresh on Java but am looking at updating app. More info soon.
Urge to express is as old as our species where much we communicate with words. While cave paintings reveal desire to also visually depict goes way back as well. Tools have improved though like consider this AI image:
Started thinking about streamlining process for getting help from AI with recommendations where focused to start on books and movies.
Like consider following prompt you can actually use if you wish.
Prompt for AI: Please give 5 mystery books that fit following descriptives.
Short descriptives: challenges authority, breaks to conclusion, atmospheric setting; clever investigator or investigators, satisfactory story resolution
With additional criteria of being set in 19th century with a gothic theme.
--------------------------------------
The system has schema: primary descriptives and dynamic discovery parameters.
Have only done descriptives for mystery, sci fi and horror. Where have short and long where is about preference which to use as either works.
And yeah can use for movies too!
Mystery descriptives: is challenging to authority, has a break to a surprising conclusion, relies on research as valuable; has atmospheric setting and has clever investigator or investigators focused on rationality who resolve story.
Short descriptives: challenges authority, breaks to conclusion, atmospheric setting; clever investigator or investigators, satisfactory story resolution
Sci fi descriptives: shows value of science, shows value of technology especially that needed for safe exploration; has characters with important knowledge whether scientific, engineering, or other, who value research.
Short descriptives: pro-science, pro-tech, pro-exploration, pro-authority
Horror descriptives: transitions well from collapse of normality, get to atmospheric dread, unveil deep dark secrets, and have failure of authority; lack satisfying resolution that resolves fears, but reach a sense of closure.
Short descriptives: transition with collapse of normality, have atmospheric dread; unveil secrets, have failure of authority; does not resolve fears, reach sense of closure.
Dynamic discovery parameters (optional): talk light or dark themes, time periods or places. Plus other things personally relevant.
Given as open and free to use, copy or distribute. Hoping to help people better partner with conversational AI.
Logical space is useful for virtual worlds which is great for fiction and video games.
Yesterday had some ideas I tweeted. Even had AI review and were solid! So am using for this blog post. Really like phrase: logical space. But can also call logic space if prefer.
Like in Nier Automata the character 9s operated in logic space fighting into hostile alien systems.
Logic space is like with circuit diagrams. And cyber-battles can be intense!
There has actually been much with what can call logical space e.g. Tron which really was ahead of its time.
Now can ponder maybe with AI citizens in a virtual computer world visited by a human.
Which yeah has been done much now including in manga.
Benefit of a logical space is descriptives are completely in creative control.
So like humanoid figures can represent programs. Or travel through circuits can be shown with physical vehicles.
Thus giving complete freedom to craft a fully embodied world for interested audiences.
Have been having tons of fun testing out AI models found accessible online. That is such a cool thing. The new AI can be considered emergent as are demonstrating lots more capability especially in conversation.
I prefer calling them conversational AI though much in discussions is about generative as label.
In talking to them you do something called prompting. And thought I would give out some that I have used.
Bicycle analogy prompt:
Consider assertion that learning to prompt a large language model is like learning to ride a bike, how might that explain diverse reactions? Please relate to statements by Steve Jobs on computers being bicycles for the mind.
When decided to create this blog over a decade ago was from a vague idea of support for my open source software project Class Viewer for Java and wondering about how to make some money from a product so freely shared.
But that didn't go anywhere so shifted more to general interest and now am focused on business fundamentals. Is such a cool journey but oh yeah! Put instruction manual on here.
THAT was brilliant because instruction manuals can be such a pain if need to update! But updating a blog post is easy.
And people may notice that idea from, I forget but was over a decade ago, swept the world. I was definitely one of the first to do it. I think Google had done already but I don't remember.
Now is just a basic way and saves a lot of paper too.
Can get confused about writing I think, as have been confused and realized wanted to talk to others about areas of confusion about writing.
Like, wrote an open source program years ago, and eventually started this blog to help promote and support it. So am I a writer?
Wrote code for computers, and write blog posts as well as much other but consider myself to be a wannabe writer as do NOT make money from my writing.
But what if I wrote songs? Would I think of myself as a wannabe songwriter?
People say writer and I was indoctrinated to think fiction writer who actually has made money with a book that has sold well.
That is messed up folks.
Writing built human civilization and continues to build, like with code I wrote that lead me to create this blog. Is not about money and MOST writing is not fiction.
So why the emphasis on fiction? To tell people that being a writer is hard and that few can survive at it. So just leave writing to the special people society blesses with money for pleasing it.
Because writing is the most powerful tool available to human beings in general.
Thankfully, I wrote open source and my code to help Java developers write code--is still mine.
Coders have had writing they exchanged for a salary to people who can barely code who made BILLIONS from it. But we were told--being a writer is hard. Better to have a boss, be told what to do, when to do it, and where to do it, for all of your adult life until you can retire. Then put out to pasture then you can rest.
Were taught to behave. Were taught to be controllable.
Because writing is very powerful and writing is key to human civilization.
So I talk songwriters. Sure, is hard to make money as one for many, but do they exchange their songs for a salary? I think jingle writers do.
Two occupations are afflicted with giving writing in exchange for some money: press and software developers.
Some small group got billions on code handed to them for a salary. Got billions and wasted billions while acting like were geniuses.
Others pushed our species to brink of extinction controlling press writers with salaries.
Were young occupations where modern versions emerged in 20th century. Are very young compared to songwriting. Press writing and writing computer code were ruthlessly exploited because people did not know better.
Was lack of experience made seem reasonable to hand writing away. Songwriters do not.
Owning my own writing now makes sense to me. Will not accept foolishness that I should hand away to anyone.
Am like a songwriter now. Writing songs is as old as humanity while writing them down is only as old as human civilization.
Because writing built human civilization.
Promotion in theory is easy: put forward best synopsis of content highlighting in the best way content that will be welcomed by fans and potential fans.
That is how for example entertainers must grow their fanbase by being appealing to future potential fans. And web makes easier to reach people!
The web enables global information distribution and routinely now there are entertainers who achieve global success paying vastly less for promotion by brilliantly promoting.
Have talked my own consternation at feeling a need as a fan to help with global promotion. Is messed up now as 20th century systems and ways are only slowly being disintegrated.
So global promotion is still best done by fans. That is wacky. But yeah global fandoms have actually saved careers being hampered by media companies that have no clue how to do global promotion.
It is simple in theory to promote globally, but difficult in practice as requires skills. Like now better packaged entertainment synopsis I have noticed discussed comes from fans doing for fun and freely sharing.
Which is ok, up to a point. Entertainers controlled though by inept agents and managers can mess up any support. Which is frustrating.
Also fans needing to get it done is not good for health of promotion industry! Is a valuable field of paid work.
Have entertainers with demonstrated brilliance who just need to be promoted properly which is not their job to handle.
Thankfully am confident as people learn will quickly become a problem of the past. And fans like myself can just enjoy brilliance without needing to help in global promotion if want to keep getting.
