Every winter, households across Britain get misty-eyed at the latest Christmas advert from John Lewis. From 2021's'Unexpected Guest' featuring an alien crash-landing on Earth, to 2016's'Buster the Boxer' starring a dog leaping on a trampoline, these adverts pull on our heartstrings like no other. While there's still four months to go until Christmas rolls around, some people are already so excited for the advert that they're speculating what it could be about. Its script features a pocket watch left in a cozy coffee shop in a picturesque snowy village - but does it live up to John Lewis' reputation? The ad opens on a snowy village with a cozy coffee shop at the heart.

Procedural content generation has been applied to many domains, especially level design, but the narrative affordances of generated game environments are comparatively understudied. In this paper we present our first attempt to study these effects through the lens of what we call a generative archaeology game that prompts the player to archaeologically interpret the generated content of the game world. We report on a survey that gathered qualitative and quantitative data on the experiences of 187 participants playing the game Nothing Beside Remains. We provide some preliminary analysis of our intentional attempt to prompt player interpretation, and the unintentional effects of a glitch on the player experience of the game.

One of the charges against Socrates was that his arguments were like robots. As the Greek philosopher approached his own trial, Euthyphro told Socrates, "You are like Daedalus." He meant that just as Daedalus made automata that moved on their own in Greek myth, Socrates' arguments were so persuasive that his ideas seemed to move under their own power. Even 2,500 years ago, automata inspired both fascination and fear. I recently speculated about whether a machine could have a mystical experience.