Paris Buttfield-Addison

You’ve been begging for it, and here it is! Announcing an exciting new product from Yarn Spinner… 🪐 Mass Effect 2 Save Importer for Yarn Spinner 🚀 Access everything about everything that players have done in the most important game of all time, straight from Yarn. Visit yarnspinner.dev/mesaves to get started. You can find this on Bluesky to reshare it.

Eleanor arranged her storybooks on the small wooden table, her arthritic fingers tracing the worn covers she’d carried to the local library every Wednesday for twenty-three years. The familiar room felt much colder today. “We’re starting with ‘The Cloud Sailor’ since it’s Amy’s birthday,” she announced to the gathered children. Some weren’t listening, which was normal, but many were also staring at the gleaming white booth being installed in her corner....

I get it. I disagree with it, but I get it. The tech industry is throwing obscene amounts of money at LLMs. VCs are salivating over AI startups. The big important executives are regularly bleating about how “we should integrate ChatGPT into our game” because they read some Medium article about the future of interactive entertainment. But as narrative designers, we need to call this what it is: a massive distraction from what makes game characters work....

The Deeper Problems with AI in Creative Work “But AI will get better at writing stories, won’t it?” This response to my rant about AI-generated content misses the point entirely. Even if AI writing improved dramatically tomorrow, fundamental problems would remain that no algorithm refinement can fix. The environmental cost alone should give us pause. Training even a small LLM produces carbon emissions equivalent to the output of several cars, over their entire lifetimes, and each query consumes significant energy....

“Are you going to add AI writing to Yarn Spinner?” It’s a question I hear almost weekly these days. Whether at game development conferences, online, or during meetings, there’s an assumption that every tool is racing to implement some form of generative AI. I understand the curiosity—we’re living through an unprecedented wave of AI hype, and there’s genuine confusion about where these technologies might fit into creative processes. So I thought I’d share some thoughts on why we’re taking a different path....

Some new links! Huzzah! “The closer to the train station, the worse the kebab” - A “Study” Blogging in the age of ‘AI’ SQL Injection Court (also worth reading this vaguely similar story about 32 million emails) More soon!

So it didn’t end up being weekly. Here’s some links! Duh: Fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees Torment nexus is going well: “A significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities” Who would have guessed? AI code generation leads to more code, more duplicated code, less cohesive systems, more defects Residential networking over telephone More next ‘week’!

We’re thrilled to announce that Jon, from the Secret Lab and Yarn Spinner team will be presenting a talk at the GDC this year in San Francisco: ‘DREDGE’ and Yarn Spinner: Building Narrative with Open Source. The talk will explore how the indie hit, DREDGE, uses our Yarn Spinner technology for narrative, and how you can do the same. Join us at GDC! Email me via paris AT yarnspinner.dev if you’d like to organise a meeting, too....

Today, I got back from the South Australian Game Exhibition 2025 (SAGE). It was an expo and mini-conference with a showcase, and an awards night, run by the South Australian Film Corporation and the South Australian Games Association, respecively. This was the first time at this fantastic weekend of events for me, and I have to say: I will definitely be back. The South Australian games industry is doing really well....

Update: This event is now passed, and it went great! I’m incredibly excited to be speaking at the upcoming TasICT event in Hobart, alongside the fabulous Procreate, Handbuilt Creative, and Screen Tasmania. I’ll be representing Secret Lab and Yarn Spinner, and no doubt Tas Game Makers, our Tasmanian Games Incubator, and other things will get a look in as well. If you’re in Hobart, get along to the event to show your suport for the connection between Tasmania’s technology industry and creative technology industry!...